We needed to get a 7am taxi to the airport, so we allowed ourselves a good five minutes for breakfast. This was long enough to eat some braun and to discover that the day's batch of bread pudding was sans tofu. I always suspected that the previous day's offering was just down to some bizarre mishap. It turned out that Lloyd had managed to arrange two taxis to take us and thought about hair-brained schemes in order to avoid us walking out of the hotel and one of them wanting to kill us. He settled on taking the first one we got to and hoping very hard. The drivers had worked it out for themselves though and come to an arrangement so it all proved unnecessary.
We got through check-in and security in five minutes and the flight itself was only 35 minutes. We were back in Kunming! Due to flights being re-arranged by the airline, we had a five hour wait for the connection to Shanghai. We killed a little time by revisiting the massage chair place - actually the airport had five or six lots of them so we didn't go to the same girl in case she thought that English people were crazy about pretend massages.
We got a taxi to the cafe place that Hope from the bar had recommended to us the night before. The journey there took ages due to the traffic, and I saw one of the least delightful sights of the trip - two dead and bloodied dogs tied to the back of a bike.
The coffee place was ok - mexican food and free internet. I wrote up some of my blog from the notes I'd taken and Lloyd went and bought some rubbish, and an excellent book for me - Confucious Analects. The place did ok mexican food, and if you poo'd in their toilets they would fine you five pounds. I'm not saying that those two facts are related.
As we had seen bad traffic earlier, we left a lot of time to get to the airport, which was lucky because there was a lot of confusion about the change of flights and having to swap our tickets. Lloyd's impressive Mandarin skills got us through again, well done that man. Throughout the trip to China, I've been interested in whether I'd be able to do it on my own with no Mandarin. Most of the time, I think it would have been possible but pretty difficult. In this case, I'd have been in trouble for sure though.
We arrived in Shanghai and got a taxi for 45 minutes or so to Lloyd's apartment - 15 quid. It felt strangely like coming home. We then got another taxi to the other side of Shanghai, well it was a long way at least, it would be unfair to suggest that I have any idea of where these various parts of Shanghai are.
We met Marisa and Amelia at a Tepanyaki restaurant. First came some really lovely sushi, and then a fruit salad. Then we had some steak fillet. The excitement of the Tepanyaki is that a chef stands at your table the whole time cooking your food on a huge grill. Our guy was good fun. The steak was done to the requested number between 1 and 10. I braved a 3, which luckily was only marginally dead, as I had wanted. The others had higher numbers because they hate flavour. It was ridiculously delicious. We then had another bit of steak that was equally as good and some great chicken.
It was just Marisa and I at the apartment that night. We watched the film 'Inconceivable' which was enjoyable, apart from the complete cop-out of an ending.
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