Entering China
Trip Start
Jul 16, 2011
1
6
31
Trip End
Aug 16, 2011
Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Monday, July 18, 2011
Customs was next, and this was just a large x-ray machine on which everyone dumped their bags. There was no one visibly monitoring it, and the scene was a bit of a mosh pit. Tony had to pick Nicholas up to stop him from being trampled, and I used my New York aggressiveness to get around to the other end to make sure our bags didn't go astray. But we got through without losing anything, and we were in China.
The Shenzhen metro is shiny new and very impressive. The vending machines have an English option, and have a touch screen map of the system to select where you are going. The DC metro could definitely benefit from this technology. When you pay, you get a plastic token with a RFID chip that you scan on entering and drop into a slot on exiting. There was another security x-ray machine -- this one being monitored -- that you had to put your bags on to enter. We only had one stop to travel.
Of course, then we had the challenge of actually finding our hotel. It turns out that it was only about 2 blocks from the train station -- but we wandered around quite a bit more than that before we found it. With hindsight, we probably should have just taken a cab from the border. Checking in was also a bit of an adventure, as the desk clerk only spoke a few words of English. She managed to communicate that we needed to pay a 400 RMB deposit, but we didn't have enough cash, and so were asking where we could find an ATM. Turns out, they were happy to have us sign a credit slip and then rip it up when it wasn't needed, but it took a lot of handwaving to get to that point. In spite of the language gap, the boys managed to charm the hotel staff, and one of them gave Nicholas a little cat pendant.
Once we got settled in the room, we set out to look for some food and maybe some shopping. The boys had been fascinated by the tourist crap at the store where the Peak Tram lets out in Hong Kong, but we had told them to wait because things would be cheaper pretty much anywhere else, and Nicholas in particular was desperate to find something to buy. Well, we succeeded in finding food, but the part of Shenzhen we were in was clearly a better place to buy "brand name" clothing than touristy stuff. We did find a Walmart, which I insisted we take a peek into. (It looked remarkably like a Walmart, if your local Walmart sold fresh lychee fruit.)
Then it started to pour, so we just bolted for our hotel. We were soaked to the skin by the time we got there, so we called it a day.
The next day, we took the metro to the airport. I was more than a little nervous about our ability to navigate checking in for the flight on our own, but it worked out fine. We found the China Southern airlines counters (which were labeled in English as well as Chinese), handed the lady our passports and the printout from our c-trip etickets and she handed us boarding passes. Going through security looked just about exactly like in the US, except that they don't make you take off your shoes, and they collected a lot more cigarette lighters in the bins.
While we were making our way through the airport, they were announcing boarding for our flight already, so we ran a bit, but then there was a delay before we actually took off. And then we were on our way to Guilin.
