Days 1 & 2 were really all about the journey, having left home around 7:00am on Tuesday morning and arriving at our hotel around 8:30pm on Wednesday night. Given a good deal for miles on DeltaOne, we flew to Shanghai up front, which was a real treat for the gals (despite it being in one of Delta’s old 777 cabins before adding the suites).

I also booked us a 1 bedroom suite at the Marriott City Centre. Very nice room. This also proved to be a wise decision as some of us could sleep while others used the living room.

The transfer from airport (usual dystopian environment after spending half a day on a plane) to the hotel was very smooth. After dropping off our luggage, we went to Starbucks for a coffee and headed out to the neon lights of Nanjing Road to find some dinner (ate some really good, spicy Sichuan dishes).

The big challenge with this journey is getting onto the right sleep schedule. Emerson suffered the worst, as she got the best night’s sleep on the way over. Libby and I managed to fall asleep by 2 or and were up again by 6 or 7 (after a pretty restless night). Emerson didn’t sleep at all.

Day #3, which was Thursday, started with complimentary breakfast at the executive lounge (a great perk of my Marriott lifetime status). We then returned to the room and let Emerson sleep for about 3 hours before waking her up (really unwelcome!) and heading out for the day.

We didn’t do too much on Thursday — explored the area around The Bund & People’s Square and visited the Shanghai Museum. Honestly, our main mission was fighting exhaustion and staying awake during the day. Dinner was less successful this night–not that the food was bad. It’s just difficult to enjoy a meal on the verge of collapse. Indeed, even walking back to the hotel a few short blocks felt like a struggle.

We did have one of the funnier moments of the trip at the restaurant. The wait staff didn’t speak English. But, our waitress really wanted to ask us a question. When we didn’t understand the Chinese (despite speaking it too us more loudly), she got a piece of paper and then proceeded to write the question down in Chinese for us (as if that was likely to help). LOL

Thankfully, the Internet came through with real-time translation. Thus, we established that Emerson did not want ice in her water. And, as it turned out, she didn’t want the water either since it was “with bubbles.”

We were all fast asleep by 8:00pm or so.

Day #4 started early… I was up at one o’clock in the morning, and the girls weren’t too far behind me a couple of hours later. Today was our visit to Shanghai Disneyland. I booked our tickets online (quite cheap compared to US prices) and paid a bit more for early access to the park. This paid off as we were able to do many rides (some twice) first thing in the morning and then spent the rest of the day at a more leisurely pace moving around the park.

We had a late lunch at a Wolfgang Puck’s in their version of Disney Springs, called Disneytown. We also did some shopping there and had salted custard egg bao from Crystal Jade.

We left the park around 5:30 and made it back to the hotel by around 7:00 (traffic was heavy). Emerson fell asleep in the car, despite our best efforts to keep her up. We then fell asleep in the car, despite our best efforts to keep each other awake. Dinner consisted of snacks from the nearby convenience store, as we mostly just wanted to go to bed.

Day #5 saw us awake fairly early, which enabled us to grab coffees and a light breakfast at 6am. We then relaxed for a bit before heading out on a dumpling tour and class, which started at 10:30am. This was a blast. The food tasted excellent (the pan-fried soup dumplings were especially revelatory), and the dumpling-making class was a lot of fun too. We also had a nice, small group with us including a New Zealand / South African expat couple living and teaching in Shanghai.

After the tour, we wandered back to our hotel through the French Concession, which felt far more “Upper East Side” than “Midtown” to us. We didn’t see a lot of hotels (at least not big, international chains) in this area, but it looked like a nice spot for eating and drinking (not to mention a short walk to the exquisite dumpling and bao spots). We came upon a market that was oddly celebrating Thanksgiving, as well as a number of historically important sights related to the founding of the PRC (which admittedly were largely meaningless to us).

Dinner was a light meal from room service, as we still had many dumplings in our belly.

Overall, Shanghai was a joy despite our being in a bit of a jet lag induced fog. It’s probably not a fair comparison because I go to Beijing for business, not pleasure, but I personally liked it Shanghai a lot more. We could have probably used one more day to really see the city, but this worked out well. We’d happily come back here.

Today’s just a travel day: Tampa to Atlanta, Atlanta to Shanghai.

Due to the length of the flight and departure time from Atlanta, we left Tampa around 9:45 in the morning, which meant driving to the airport in rush hour. Thankfully, that was the only real “lowlight” of he day.

We boarded our plane in Tampa on time, and Emerson was very pleased to see that we’d secured first class seats. She also quickly tumbled to the fact that that might mean we had first class seats to Asia too. And, she was right! I’d booked us in Delta One on the route over, which was a real treat for the gals.

In Atlanta, we visited the Sky Club before boarding our flight aboard a Delta 777 (sadly one of the planes not yet retrofitted with the Delta One Suites). It’s probably Delta’s worst business class hard product in my opinion, as I prefer even the 767-300s. But, the ladies were happy, which made me happy.

Our hotel in Hong Kong is the Courtyard Marriott Hong Kong. It’s located on Hong Kong Island to the west of Central near the Sheung Wan neighborhood. The hotel is very modern and overlooks Victoria Harbour. Unlike the sleek, modern glitz of Central, Western is a more traditionally Chinese part of town. Here’s an exercise for you: imagine the best “China Town” you’ve ever visited. Now, multiple that experience by a factor of 100. That’s Western. Our walk to the nearest MTR station (about 15 minutes) takes us past innumerable shops selling (and smelling of) dried seafood and unknown herbal ingredients/remedies/both. Snake bile wine? Edible birds’ nests? Perhaps, some deer penis? Check. Check. And, check. Of course, globalization is here too: there’s a Starbucks around the corner.

Our adventure for the day involved taking the MTR (Hong Kong’s metro/subway) out to Lo Wu (also written as Luo Ho), which is one of the handful of land-based border crossings into mainland China from Hong Kong. This, of course, involved using the MTR, which necessitated figuring out how to buy the tickets and navigate the system. We managed to do this with minimal trouble and no mistakes, thereby finding ourselves at the Lo Wu border crossing in about an hour. Crossing the border into the People’s Republic was a breeze with our newly minted visas. Tip: unlike a lot of countries, Americans can’t get a visa for China on the spot at border crossings. If you’re in Hong Kong for more than a couple of days, it’s easy to arrange the visa from here; if not, either take a group tour (which provides a group visa), or pay a bit of premium by arranging the entry visa from home (as we did using VisaExpress.net).

After crossing the border, we found ourselves in Shenzhen, the first “special economic zone” (SEZ) created in the 1970s as an experiment to integrate Western-style capitalism into socialist/communist China. Needless to say, I suspect you know how that’s worked out. As a result, Shenzhen (as our travel guidebook says) “has gone from gulag to Gotham City” in only a couple of decades. However, aside from some kitsch tourist traps sights outside of town and the Lo Wu Commercial Center (a multi-story mecca of low-price Chinese merchandise), Shenzhen offers little for leisure travelers. No, to really appreciate mainland China, we’ll have to come back and visit places like Shanghai and Beijing.

We returned to Central in the late afternoon, exploring the modern architecture and swank shops, such as the Landmark Centre. Having eaten little all day, we were ready for dinner by 6pm. One of our guidebooks suggested a place in Central called Jimmy’s Kitchen, which is famous for its “comfort food” (no further description provided). So, we tried it. Jimmy’s menu is a hodgepodge of English and Hong Kong favorites… a sort of upscale version of what’s called “Soy sauce Western” around here (e.g., flash fried Camembert cheese coated in breading and sesame seeds). We were hungry. It was good to good enough. But, I probably wouldn’t return or recommend it.

After dinner, we enjoyed a leisurely 30 minute stroll back to our hotel (about 1.5 miles).

Today’s box score: +2 countries (Hong Kong and China)