It's civilization baby!

Haaaaaaaleeeeeeeluuuuuuujaaaaaaaa

To start off with, it is so nice to finally be in Shanghai... and by finally we mean the following:
Got up early yesterday to eat breakfast and go to the airport to leave Lhasa for Chengdu, and then from there to Shanghai. First, we waited for breakfast for 40 minutes, ate it in 3, and then headed for the airport in order not to miss the flight. However, the traffic was so slow that we had to tell the driver to drive faster... and he did. He drove 110 km/h, passing cars constantly (almost driving on the wrong side of the road more often than not) and still we ended up at the airport just under an hour before take off.

Completely stressed out we headed for the check in... got to the desk in time, and checked in... phew... everything was fine and dandy. We'd make it... so we went upstairs to the gate...
Joakim: Hmm... sophie... it says gate 3 (of 3) on the ticket, but our flight is not on the monitor.
Sophie: Thats weird... we'll ask at the information desk.
Joakim: Excellent.
Sophie: Of course.
Kiss

Joakim: Excuse me, we are on CA4402, but its not on the monitor.
Information: ?
Joakim: Uhmm... english.
Information: Wait moment *greasy smile*

More than a dozen moments passed and a telephone was handed to joakim.
Voice: *&(F*&SDLJHFKDJSH delayed )*(&F)(*DS& go eat lunch FDS(*DF)(* hotel F)(DS*)(*DSF bye
Joakim: ?

Ok, so ... in short, flight was delayed, no one spoke english, and we were stranded in lhasa for 4 hours... they said it was because of weather in chengdu, but flights left for chengdu every 30 minutes... turns out, the airplane was kaputt, so they had to get another one. This meant that we missed our connecting flight in Chengdu for Shanghai. Yums.

Now, we wanted to know what flight we could take from chengdu, but the people working at the airport refused to help us, and couldnt even give us the number for Air China. We solved it by calling our hostel, 4500 km away, and had them look it up for us... insane.

Anyway, finally got to Chengdu, got booked onto a new flight with Sichuan Airlines... and guess what... it was also delayed. Waiting for the flight, we bonded with an old canadian indian (not the north american kind of indian) called Rad. He had some great stories to tell, and helped us in shanghai to get to our hostel.

During the flight, we also saw 150 chinese people have simultaneous and steward in flight lead gymnastics on a 2 hour flight. If you want to learn this collective chinese form of in flight gymnastics, sophie will be holding a course at Millesgarden in august... 500 kr one day, 995 for two days... refreshments not included and bring your own towel. But, there will be freshly brewed yak meat for everyone!

Finally arrived in Shanghai by 23... hostel is great, and a great location too. It was really cool to arrive by night. Seems like the only city to come even close to rivalling New York, that we've visited at least.

Spent the day walking around shanghai today and we really like it. We've walked on The Bund (opposite of the skyline), seen Yuyan garden and visited Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center. The last one was especially cool, since you could see how they have planned to build shanghai in the future. The model of it was amazing and they also had a computerized, 360 degrees, "moving" version of 2010 shanghai which you could travel in. It was for the Expo 2010. For those of you familiar with the computer game GTA, you could really see a whole new GTA franchise series here...

Tonight we are heading for a birthday drink, or 4, at Cloud 9 bar... overlooking Shanghai. Hopefully they will let two smelly, scruffy backpackers enter their exclusive bar. If not, well, I guess you will read about it in the paper tomorrow.

So, shanghai is big, noisy, and thank god, civilized :)