I’m leaving on a small vacation today. It seems like a good idea since I don’t have to work until Wednesday.

But then again, it’s a family trip. I’m never able to decide whether I like being on those or not. If I could just tape my youngest little brother’s mouth shut, it would probably be very enjoyable. The family wouldn’t like that though. I think I’ll just go for avoiding him as much as possible instead. He must (almost) be the noisiest brat in the northern hemisphere, and he’s bringing along a just as noisy friend.

The vacation spot is beautiful though, and so close to the sea!

Because, seriously, I’ve only got 10 days left in Shanghai.

I’ve been unable to update during the last few months, because of laziness, the worst internet in the world, travelling and more. But here they are, the last two weeks of my time in China. I’m so unprepared – I still have two more laaarge boxes of stuff to send back home, and I’ve been too lazy for the past two weeks to just buy in some strong tape and send them off. Needless to say, I have a lot to do.

I’m going to write about my small backpacking trip around the south of China with Monique and Nicole when I get back home (because I want to post pictures at the same time). We travelled to Hong Kong, Macau, Guilin, Yangshou, Xing Ping, Chengdu and Leshan, and I have tons of pictures and stories. In Hong Kong, we went to Disneyland – and I took so many panda pictures in Chengdu!

Also, I have a really bad cold. The throat-rasping, lung-spitting kind. Suits me well for standing over a half hour outside in cold, rainy weather and minimal clothing while trying to hail a cab. Damn the Chinese for not having a queue system, or manners enough to let the person who hailed the cab drive off in it. Every time I managed to get the attention of a free cab, some damn person came running from the side, jumped into my cab and drove off before I could protest. And that happened several times.

Manners isn’t the greatest thing with cab, metro and traffic culture in general down here, so I get happy every time I see the governments campaigns of behaving. Lately, there’s been “metro guards” in the larger metro stations during rush hour. They force the people to cue up on the sides so people can get off before the others get on, only to fail miserably when the train doors open and the Chinese get into a desperate (no, not kidding) frenzy of getting themselves as fast as possible into the train (while elbowing, kicking and screaming) – ignoring the people inside the wagons just as desperate attempts to get out.

It’s the same thing for the seats too. “The battle of the seats”. Be one second too slow, and someone else has put their ass down in the seat you were targeting. If there are free seats when the door opens, you’ll see people diving to get them. Even if there are old people needing them nearby. I don’t see people giving away their seats very often down here. It’s much more common to really pretend like you aren’t paying attention, so you can keep the seat to yourself.

I stood at People Square for a while last week, just observing. Every time the people got forced to stand in a queue (and the queue sneaks and the ones who still didn’t get it got scolded and sent to the back of it), they’d break it and start running towards the doors as soon as they opened. I’d say amusing, if it weren’t for the fact that I have to take that damn metro reaaaaally often during rush hour. I’m going to see if I can tape it sometime before I leave. We’ll. Otherwise I can just ask to borrow some videos from friends.

On another topic, it’s also really warm here now, but the temperature changes fast.. It goes from sunny 35 degrees Celsius to 25 and raining so fast that around 20 to 23 degrees seems icy with the air condition on in the metro.

I’m not going to say I’ve been too busy to post over the weekend, because I truly haven’t. More like the opposite, since I’m suffering from the exact kind of jetlag as I did when I arrived in Norway.

And I’m so sleepy during day time I have problems staying awake. Not agaaain. Oh well. I’ll have to turn it around during the weekdays because of school – I can’t afford to loose more days than I already have. Tomorrow’s Monday so I only have one class. Shouldn’t be to hard to attend. I just need to put on multiple alarm clocks to make sure I actually wake up on time.

The plane trip, though way too long, was actually rather pleasant this time. Except for 15 minutes on the last flight when a kiddo started screaming. My first plane ride from Norway to Amsterdam, 2 hours, was with KLM. We boarded around 45 minutes after the actual boarding time because of delays, but KLM’s service is impeccable – even with a stuffed air plane. Besides, the dessert was apple pie. Need I say more?

The two hours I was supposed to spend at Amsterdam was more like an hour because of the delay, and I literally had to run through the airport because I needed to recieve a second boarding pass from Korea Air’s service desk. There was some kind of trouble with the seating charts (or something) while I was still in Norway, so I couldn’t get all of them at once. I’ll say it was “just my luck” that service desk 8, which I needed to go to, and my gate was completely on the opposite end of the gate I arrived at. And the lady behind the desk obviously was not at all in a rush. Stressing. Getting on board the plane afterwards was great though. Especially when I found out that the plane was almost empty. There must have been one, maybe two at most, people at each row – and some of the rows had five seats. I got a two-seat row completely to myself. Korea Air even provided a small bag with warm socks, sleeping mask, tooth brush and paste. That’s one thing you definitely don’t get on economy class on KLM’s flights. Korea Air’s the new favourite. 10 hours flying felt like nothing at all.

The air port in Korea (no clue which side) was pretty much like every other air port, except that I needed to take a metro train from one side to another. I went directly to the gate and then spent the two waiting hours (or, the remaining one and a half hour) watching Gossip Girl and eating candy. Because everyone needs a break from travelling. xD

I was quite tired when I got on the very last plane, which by the way also was almost empty because a lot of the other passengers’ flights had been delayed. I don’t remember much of the flight though, except that the food was horrible and that I slept during take off. I didn’t realize we were in the air before we were already an hour into the two hour flight. The air looked, to me, as if it was standing still. The customs didn’t take an hour like last time I entered China either – there was only me and and one other person in the “foreigner” cue. They didn’t insist on scanning the luggage either, it must have taken me less than 15 minutes to exit the airport.

I might have forgotten a whole lot of my Chinese during the last three weeks, but even in my half-asleep state I managed to get on the maglev train and then communicate where I was going to the taxi driver. And I got a good, non-crazy taxi driver too.

Oh and I’ve got a new flatmate again! ^^

I was supposed to leave for Shanghai today, but that didn’t quite work out as planned. Don’t you just love getting up at 1 AM before a long distance flight, only for it to be cancelled? Irony, if course.

I got up at 1 AM, left home around 2:30, was at the airport at around 4:30 and then went through those long, silly before-flight routines, aka everything from passport controls to luggage checks (I was the “lucky” winner of an extra thoroughly check) only to get to know around 6:30 that my flight was cancelled. Tiresome, to say the least. There wasn’t enough air in the front wheel of the plane, and since they hadn’t yet figured out what had happened we couldn’t leave. That part was okay though. Better safe than sorry.

Then came the “get-your-luggage-back” dance. Usually you can pick up your stuff almost right after landing – this time it took almost a half hour before they even started the band. Do I sound whiny yet? Oh you have just no idea. I just had one hell if a morning. Night. Yeah.

After that, we had to get our tickets refunded or rebooked by KLM. Which is easier said than done. The queue consisted of around 100 way-too-tired Norwegians, and we were just standing there for hours on an end. During two hours, we had moved three meters further into the insanely long line – and I was standing in the last part of it. They did set up some buses so people could travel to Oslo’s main airport to take a different flight, but I wasn’t even in the front part of the queue when the last bus left at 9 AM.

Waiting for so long “kind of” ruined my usually good flight mood, so I didn’t have any patience to wait for the next plane to Amsterdam (and then China) because of the at least 6 hours of waiting before it. Instead, I rebooked for Wednesday since tomorrow didn’t have any afternoon flights, and I’m way done with early morning flights. So the day after tomorrow, darlings, I’m going back to Shanghai. I honestly can’t wait! There’s nothing to do but wait for my plane while I’m still in Norway.

Oh, and next time I might have two in-between landings, but one of them is in Seoul! It might just be the airport in Korea, but I’m still looking forward to seeing a tiny bit.. Maybe they have cheaper food there. Yum.

I actually liked flying with what seemed to be the combination on China Airlines and Lufthansa on the second part of the trip.

The seats were good, the food was better than the usual plane food (and you got to choose between two dishes for each meal), they showed decent movies and we all got a blanket and a pillow each. Also, no one used the seat next to me (at first, anyway), so I had a lot of space to put my things and an old, Chinese woman at the end of our three seat row. Now, that old woman is a whole other story.

Sounds good, hm?

I got really home sick about half-ways into the flight. I missed the parents, the cat, my siblings, family and friends, my music, not to mention my own room. The plane was shaking every minute, and that old lady I mentioned before took all of the pillows – including mine when I took a small trip to the toilet. She didn’t need them though – she wasn’t the old, shaky kind who needs pillows for comfort – my pillow became her cuddle bear for the last five hours of the trip. Also, she wasn’t even polite enough to wait for me to stand up and move out of the row so she could pass into the hallway, instead she stood up in her seat and walked over me, stepping on my things in the process.

Being so far away from home, and without a pillow it was too hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in, the homesickness got rather bad. And the crying-cliché Hong Kong romance drama they were showing on screen didn’t really make anything better. Good movie though, funny with good actors and a very handsome main actor. It was named “lies”-something, but I really don’t think I’ll find it with subtitles even if I remember the name.

Anyway, I got over the homesickness when I got breakfast, and I’ve still only had two more hours of it (the homesickness, not the breakfast) during the one week and two days I’ve been here. Maybe it’s because I’ve been so busy, or maybe it’s because I’ve managed to get some friends. Or maybe it’s because I sort of distanced myself during the time I couldn’t contact people outside Shanghai – I didn’t get an internet connection in my apartment before yesterday. I felt a bit helpless the very first day though. My EF connection didn’t give me the right apartment address (so I’m glad the EF driver knew where I was going to stay), and insisted on the schools address being my own – so I couldn’t go too far in case I managed to get lost. I didn’t know my way around, didn’t know where the store was and didn’t have anyone to contact. A girl named Yi Chu called me later in the evening though. She’s Swedish, a classmate of mine and arrived on the same day as me. We ate dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken that night, and, even though the food definitely wasn’t good, it made me feel less helpless to get a friend who lived nearby.

I actually managed to meet one of my classmates, Nicole, from EF already on the airport. We’d both ordered a transfer from the airport and to our places, so we both got into the EF cab, and let’s just say we weren’t exactly impressed by taxi driver’s driving abilities. It’s not very common to have belts in the back seats either, but we’ve still been advised by the school to sit in the back when taking a taxi. The most dangerous seat is obviously next to the driver.

The weather down here is really damp, at least comparing to Norway. I actually started sweating on the airport (and it takes quite a lot before I start breaking a sweat back home), and the heat inside the airport was actually quite chill opposed to the weather outside. It’s almost as hot as it was at Lanzarote when I was there with my family in May last year.

You get very thirsty here and, although you can’t drink the tap water at all, the bottled water is very cheap. I usually buy the large ones costing less than 4 RMB (about the same in NOK) and then fill up a small bottle, 1.50 RMB or less, to bring along with me.

I’m going to make a post about the apartment and the neighbourhood somewhat later, but let’s just say the apartment is nice. Very nice. Wood panel floors, a ceiling with different levels, pretty furniture and turquoise sofas. It’s “a bit” worn down as well, and I’m definitely going to buy my own cups, bowls, plates, forks and such. It’s also got a gas oven, which I’m very scared to use because you need to light the gas with a lighter. A short lighter. Did I ever mention I’m scared of flames?

Also, I was rather shocked when I found out that it’s just as comfortable to sleep with a blanket in the windowsill as using the bed. If you knock on the “mattress” you’ll hear a metal echo. Ironic though, I thought my bed at home was a bit uncomfortable. I don’t get why they make beds as hard as this – it removes the point of having a bed.

Pictures are on my Flickr album!

14:54

Did we change time zones already, or have I’ve really only been sitting on this plane since 13:30? That can’t be right, and I’m so confused. Also, my dearest mp3-player, a Creative Zen Micro Photo, just died. And no, not power wise. I brought an extra battery in case that would happen. There must be something wrong with the firmware? Something certainly is wrong with it. It automatically goes into recovery modus, and none of the given options work (although I must admit I haven’t tried reinstalling the firmware yet). Hm, I need an internet connection – hopefully the airport in Frankfurt has a free one. Without music, I’m in for one verrry long plane ride. Other than that, I need hand cream (desperately) and a place to charge my netbook. The Aspire One’s only got about one hour left before the power shuts down – a three cell battery just doesn’t get you very far.

Oh, and the nice lady in the next seat gave me a carrot. ^^ Mucho appreciated.

12:45

You know, travelling far away from everything you’re used to isn’t quite as scary as some people like to think.

It’s thrilling, fun and not to mention something you can learn a lot from. Mucho self-development. Especially if you’re on your own.

Right now I’m sitting at Oslo Airport, gate 40, waiting for my plane. While this one goes to Frankfurt, my actual destination is Shanghai – and I can’t wait to get there! I’d post some pictures, but there’s not all that much to see (and the internet here isn’t free either, which means I’ll have to do something else than surfing the net). I’m staying in Shanghai until the beginning of June, so I’ll have plenty of time for both self-developing and taking pictures! My Nikon D50 is staying home in Norway though, along with all my wonderful lenses so I’ll have to get used to a small, compact Lumix instead.

There’s so much I’m looking forward to do! Like visiting the textile market, the botanical garden and the old part of Shanghai. Much more, too, but it wouldn’t be all that useful to write a long list and post it here. I’m also quite curious about the weather – I’ve heard it’s hot, humid and, erm, rainy? I’ll need to buy a new umbrella when I get there. A fancy, colourful one. ^^ And a computer lock for my mini-Acer.

Ooh, I think we can board the plane now! ~<3