Ni Hao~ Part Eight!

June 17, 2010 – Tsai jien, Shanghai~

So, after spending a great two weeks in Shanghai under my sister’s care, it was finally time for me to head off to my main destination for this summer…. BANGKOK!

Having a late lunch at a Southern Chinese noodle-joint (lots of peanuts in the soup, mm!) as my last meal in Shanghai, I headed off with my sister to a bus stop to take a shuttle to Pudong Airport. But, this guy with a parked, nice car was offering (or, more like… INSISTING, to put it politely!) to take me to the airport for 30 RMB (the shuttle was 24 RMB, but was running a bit late, and would take stops along the way), and ended up just basically grabbing my luggage with a Mandarin “let’s go!!”

This m-a-y sound sketchy, but, there was another person in the car going to the airport, and it seems like people just drive other people around in their cars for $, all the time in China! How fitting that that’d be my last means of transportation in China~

I always find it funny, though, when I’m with people who don’t know English at all, and likewise, I can’t speak their language either! It’s always interesting to see what types of words do come out of their mouths, in order to converse with me… This was definitely the case in this car-situation, with the driver of the car driving over the bridge in Shanghai (that goes over the Expo), and suddenly pointing and yelling out “HEL-LO! EXPO!” Aww~ cute!

Anyhow! I got to Pudong airport well on time (aka, enough time for me to not freak out about being late, ahha!), checked a couple bags, passed through security, yada yada… went to the gate, and was happy to see that the gate-waiting area had a couple TV screens playing a FIFA match between Argentina and Korea!

And yet, again, I was thoroughly pleased to see everyone in the gate area was quite into the game! Indeed, it seemed as though the gate next to us was actually full of Korean tourists going back home, and so it was fun to hear their gasps whenever Argentina came really close to scoring, shreaks whenever Argentina did score, and very high volumed cheers when Korea scored their… one point. Although I must admit that one of the goals that Argentina received was a bit unfair (the one where the ball basically bounced off of a Korean player’s leg and went into the Korean goal!), but… it was a fun game, nonetheless, especially since I watched the final score of 4:1 occur RIGHT before I walked through the gate to walk to the airplane (so, I felt highly satisfied that I knew what the outcome was, hehe).

The flight from Pudong (Shanghai) to Suvanabhumi (Bangkok) was relatively uneventful, especially since it was only 4 hours long and was in the dead of night (9pm-1am). Although I had requested to receive a vegetarian meal on my flight because I heard from both my sister and father that the other (meat) options on China Eastern Airlines is such bad quality, we ended up receiving basically a BOX of SNACKS! Which, was kind of fun, actually, since I don’t usually eat too much junk food, and it was kind of interesting to see what kind of snacks they’d give us! Anyhow, the box consisted of a dried radish thing (I didn’t try this…), dried apple chips, some peanuty-Chinese thing, KitKat’s, a pound cake slice, a bread roll with some dried hredded (flossed?) fish-stuff in the middle, and… onion cookies (shortbready-like cookies which were surprisingly pretty good, even though they indeed had a slight onion-y taste!)

Now, I’ve heard a lot about how smiley and kind-natured Thai people are, and I’m sure that this is going to become really commonplace (haha, BANAL, TRITE, as my sister would probably imagine me saying right after her saying this!), but I’m going to start my list of Little-Thai-Things-That-Brighten-My-Day! This is ridiculous, but I shall shorten this as “LTripleTBMD!” Or… should I call it “LT^3BMD?” Here goes…


LT^3BMD – I
So, while I was trying to enjoy my treasure box of snackie goodies from China Eastern Airlines during my flight, I gorged down my onion cookies and proceeded to open my plastic-packaged bread roll. What happened, though, is a mystery, because as I was opening the package, the next thing I know… my bread roll is GONE, and I hear a ‘plop!’ as I turn my head towards the aisle next to me and see that, indeed, my bread roll had escaped my clutches to roll itself on the floor and probably collect some gross airplaney ground material that I don’t even want to start thinking about.

Most of my friends know and can characterize me as being able to display my emotions quite well by both my weird vocal sounds and strange shapes that I create on my face.

This was definitely no exception, as I probably produced some sort of very disappointed/shocked look on my face, which I thought was being snickered at by some of the older men who were probably just returning from a business trip and thinking, “sucks for her! Too bad!”

I quickly gathered myself though, and proceeded to just pick up my now-sullied-bread-roll, and shamefully placed it back into its plastic wrap, grabbing the package of pound cake, instead…

But! A few minutes later, I was pleasantly surprised as the guy sitting across the aisle from me tapped me on the shoulder, to present a bread roll in his other hand to me!

It is no secret that food is one (MAJOR) way to my heart, and at that moment, I felt so delighted that this business man was offering up his BREAD ROLL to me! As I tasted the weird combo of fish stuff with puffy white-bready-goodness in my mouth, I felt so thankful~

It sounds lame. But, you had to be there. It made my day. Don’t judge, at least… not too much, ahha!