Taking an early morning train, we arrived in Shanghai Hongqiao station at half-past-ten. The journey wasn’t as bad as the one from Nanjing to Suzhou but, nonetheless, it was China, where trains are full of people with insufficient air circulation. Don’t worry, I survived to tell the tale.

We switched to a subway to get to our accomodation for the next 3 nights, where I was surprised to see that Visa and Master cards were accepted. Hooray! My heart leaped. I don’t have to pay with an app or have to depend on a machine.

Still, my mom went to get the tickets from the machine.

I did try to pay for the subway with my credit card, twice, but as some would say, “first time’s the charm.” The first time went smoothly but the second time, I got stuck when I tried to exit the station. “They probably don’t see enough credit card transactions to justify to keep the machine maintained on that front.” My mom said when she got frustrated because she had to wait for me to exit the station.

We were booked into a relatively high-end hotel that’s in an older part of the city and when I got into the room and tried to access the wifi, I got no connection. That’s bad, I thought. My phone provider only gave me 5 GB of international data for the month and I was running low. Once the 5 GB was up, the speed downgrades to a 3G level, which is slow. How can such a high-end hotel have such poor internet connection?

Before I could further react, my mom was practically dragging me out of the room. “Let’s go!” She said excitedly when all I wanted to do was lie down for a nap.

First order of business, as my mom and her cousins decided, was food. We barely had anything to eat that morning and it was approaching lunch hour. We ended up eating at a Cantonese-style restaurant across the street. I wouldn’t say the food was authentic Cantonese-style but close enough. It’s like having Chinese food in the U.S.

After lunch, we walked toward aimlessly toward the water. Without knowing where we were going, I was just walking straight until someone in the group said “turn!”

Following my mom’s lead, we entered the formerly Broadway Mansion. This hotel was completed in 1934 and is one of the many buildings that’s under protection in Shanghai for its historical and cultural value. We followed a group of tourists into the elevator up to the 16th floor where there’s a terrace overlooking the Pudong port, where cargo ships come and go on a daily basis with goods shipped from and out of China.

I was glad about the weather that afternoon. For the first time since this trip began, the humidity wasn’t as bad, there was a light breeze, and there was blue skies. I missed the blue skies.