Bucket List or Bust! - Tokyo & Shanghai - November 2016 - Travel Day

[Hannikins]

So I know travel days tend to be rather “samey” and this was really no different so forgive me for keeping the travel bit brief!

Unlike most of our recent trips the holiday did not start the night before with a nice relaxing stay at Bewleys/Claytons. Instead, as our flight wasn’t until 13:10, I had decided to drive. I was fine with this but despite setting off with 5 HOURS to spare Adam was still fretting we’d miss our flight as we’d be stuck in morning traffic… it was a Saturday. To nobodies surprise, least of all mine, we arrived at the car park with loads of time to spare. We’d chosen to use the onsite long stay, I’d used it before for a few nights on a business trip previously so knew it was a good one, a quick scan of my bar code and we were in! It was rather busy though so I had to let Adam park… I don’t do parking between two cars, if I can’t drive into it, I don’t park… despite having passed my test over 10 years ago I’m yet to have found this, or my inability to parallel or reverse park, an issue

I’d purchased smaller, lightweight 4 wheel cases for this trip and I was loving the ease with which we could push them about, public transport was going to be a doddle! A quick trip on the car park bus and we were wheeling them into departures, as we were earlier than the usual 3 hours for checkin I was expecting it to be closed but we were ok, I’d already checked in online so I just had to drop off the bags at the desk which was open.

Now before we travelled I had read up on what I needed in order to use the 144 hour visa free transit for Shanghai. I had all my printouts ready and I had checked online with Emirates customer services to double check. To make doubly sure I had even printed out the transcript of said conversation with Emirates just to be sure. None of this stopped me feeling a little anxious when the checkin assistant called over her supervisor, they frowned and looked puzzled for a while before he disappeared into the back for a good 15 mins. We were both starting to panic a bit by this point. Finally he returned, said he just had to triple check as it was such a new procedure and checked us in… PHEW!

Through to departures and with hours to spare we did some shopping and had our usual breakfast at Giraffe.. yes, we were early enough for BREAKFAST!

The gate opened a little later than planned and we headed onto the plane. First impressions were that it was very similar to Etihad, although “officially” Emirates are supposed to be better. Anyway the flight was very busy and I was glad I had managed to move our seats at the last minute. When I had originally booked the plane was empty so I booked an aisle and a window on a row of three, at the last minute I saw the plane was now packed and moved them next to each other… I hadn’t been able to do this for our second flight… I decided not to tell Adam about his new cabin mate just yet :P

We had to wait AGES for the drinks service to come round. When it finally did I was so thirsty I ordered two drinks.



I was a little puzzled by this though



Turns out it was my tonic :P

We took the classic celebratory plane selfie to annoy everyone at home on social media



The drinks service had taken so long it wasn’t long until the food started to arrive.

Beef for me



It was ok but by far the best part of the meal was the cheese and biscuits!



For dessert I was looking forward to what was billed as “Lemon Cheesecake”



It was the weirdest cheesecake I’ve ever eaten. I mean look at it!



On virgin dessert may be a little gu pot but it usually pretty much resembles the description. Still I enjoyed my cheese and biscuits that’s the best I can say about this meal :/

The first flight always seems to go quickly and after watching a few films and having a snooze we were soon in Dubai. Our flight was late and a woman on our flight was panicking that she only have an hour to go to catch her connecting flights, she went running off in a panic and I joked to Adam that we had a short connection on the return and that would probably be us… little did I know :/

Food options were limited in the terminal and although a trip to shake shack in the other terminal was tempting we opted for the golden arches instead.

There were no chairs so I left adam standing at a bar and I went to join the queue to order. I ended up behind a girl with a backpack twice the size of her on her back. She kept turning and bumping me with it and then backing up for no apparent reason until she reached the point where I felt her backpack and I had a much closer relationship than I had with Adam. Just as I was about to say something (I was crabby from the flight, I’m usually a docile wallflower) she had the cheek to turn round to throw me the filthiest look and say “excuse me, do you mind”. I was too shocked to say anything. Obviously in the queue afterwards I thought of many a choice word to throw at the little pixie but at the time I was speechless. Still later I saw her pretty much go flying over her backpack on the floor… I think the backpack did it on purpose, I knew it wouldn’t take her dissing me after the relationship we had shared

Drama over I finally got our food



It was huge, they had given us a large. I checked my receipt, I had paid for a large, I certainly hadn’t asked for it though, grrrr!

I soon regretted drinking my bucket of coke…. squat toilets. In skinny jeans there was no way that was happening so I had to sit there and hold it in for a good 2 hours before our second flight was called.

I had hoped to get to our seat before piggy in the middle arrived but to no avail. Adam looked puzzled, so did the chinese guy playing piggy. Thankfully he’d spotted the issue and offered me his seat, phew!

Problem solved without me having the explain my boo boo, bonus :P

Same issue with drinks service and food on this flight except the food was REALLY late.

Food was some sort of noodles and a weird pudding… I just ate the bread roll, this meal was a new plane low



I wish they would just tell you when to expect food them you can snooze around it. As it happened we were really late getting any kind of shut eye and despite saying she was coming back with my drink during dinner it never arrived so I was starting to get a headache. In the end I got up and got my own before trying to get some kip.

After some shut eye I was pleasantly surprised to see we were nearly there!



and shortly afterwards we landed to some pretty grim weather



Although I had been expecting this it was a bit of a bummer

[Hannikins]

Exiting the plane we were greeted by a HUGE immigration queue. I had thought Orlando was bad but this was a massive queue. I hadn’t filled in my arrival forms so I quickly found a desk to do that. I was about to join the huge queue when I noticed a sign mentioning the 144 transit visa so I walked towards it down a cordoned off area, I kept walking, and walking, until I finally reached the end where there were only 3 people in front of us, BONUS! it was like having a fastpass back in the days where nobody understood them, complete with dirty looks from those in the big queue, haha!

Despite the short queue it did take a while to process everyone so it was a good hour before we were though and had collected our baggage (still quicker than the main queue though!). Now I hadn’t really fleshed out the transport details from here to disney. I knew I could get a taxi but I also knew there was a bus, I couldn’t remember from where though or at what time.

As we exited we were bombarded by people trying to sell us transport. One tried really hard, even flashing his “staff” badge. I explained I was looking for the bus and he ushered me to the transport desk, Adam was starting to look uneasy as if we were about to be scammed but there was no way i was buying anything from this guy. He transferred me to a lady who I again tried to explain that I was getting the bus and just needed to know from where. She said they could get us transport, would only take and 1hour (“only”, disney was only 3 miles away!). I tried again, explaining I needed a “bus” eventually, in the best “posh” accent ever she said “OOOOOH you mean a bus!” clearly my northern version of “bus” wasn’t the same thing, a proper “bath”/“barth” moment realising she wasn’t going to get a sale she pointed us at the tourist info desk, not in a bad way, she was very polite. At tourist info I learned that the bus was only in the morning so after all that faff we made our way to the taxi rank, or at least we tried to, at every turn we were met with “staff” offering to get us a taxi. Ignore them, head straight for the rank.

Once in the cab again we had a bit of a language barrier, it’s “Disanee” in case you struggle :P I had also printed out the name of the toy story hotel in chinese as I knew people had had difficulty explaining it and had ended up at disney main entrance instead of the hotel, that seemed to help. Finally we were on our way. Our taxi driver was a very cheery soul and kept beeping at other taxi drivers as we passed shouting “Disanee” they would beep and we’d all cheer.

The area around disney was very well kept, you could tell it was all brand new, 15 minutes later (an hour it takes apparently!) we were pulling up outside the hotel. (taxi was approx Ł10)

The first thing we noticed were the waving cast members, everywhere, in fact I’m convinced some of them are employed just to do this. Everywhere you go there are waving smiling cast members to either give you a “hello” or a “bye bye” it was really rather cute but I can’t help feeling that these have been introduced recently to appease the american guests who reviewed opening and described chinese cast members as unfriendly, we thought the complete opposite even if it was a little scary and manic on occasion!

Anyway checked in we headed up to our room. The hotel is super cute, even the lift had a little surprise (no spoilers!)





The room itself was just as cute. I think they say this is on par with a value resort but it didn’t feel this way at all, probably because everything is so new, it felt very similar to a moderate to us.

We spent some time checking out the room and relaxing for a while





This was my favourite!



Washed, dressed, changed and a lot more relaxed we decided to head out and explore.

There’s a bus to disneytown so we joined that queue to the right of reception and a bus was already waiting (this was not luck, there was always a bus, we never waited, not once!)



It was still raining slightly but not enough to put us off exploring. We decided to do a walk around the area, take a few photos before heading for some dinner.



The area was very pretty and exceptionally well kept. It’s open spaced areas were similar to what they have in Hong Kong.

We then did some shopping, it’s got a feel of disney springs to it certainly.











The rain was getting heavier now and the wind was picking up so we decided to grab some dinner. The plan had been to eat at the cheesecake factory but as I wasn’t feeling that hungry we decided to save that and instead head somewhere different, we ended up at the boathouse as it sounded nice and looked lovely.



The first thing we noticed was that it was dead



This didn’t bother us too much, everywhere except the cheesecake factory and one cantonese place were just as dead so this wasn’t unusual.

We were ushered into the patio area which was empty but had lovely views of the disneyland hotel across the lake.





Things got a bit weird from here on in. The staff all kind off “lingered” nearby and watched us, it was a very weird feeling. On ordering drinks only 1 arrived. They also brought water so we decided to leave it.



The staff continued to stand and watch us until we were ready to order. Adam ordered a seafood dish with garlic bread



and I ordered the hainese chicken



Adam said his was really nice. Mine was awful. I’ve had this before in singapore so I knew it would be cold, what I wasn’t expecting was it to be raw and pretty much all bone. I ended up just eating the rice with the sauce and a tiny bit of chicken which wasn’t pink.

At this point things got weirder. The staff kept walking up to us, seeing something on our table, who knows what, and thinking we weren’t finished. Even when I tried to get their attention they would avert their eyes and walk away. Now that may be because they didn’t know any english and were scared to deal with us, fair enough, but it didn’t seem that way earlier. I was getting tired and grumpy at this point so I finally got the managers attention to pay…. my card was declined. I asked him to try again which he did and it worked fine (total cost of the meal was Ł22).

NOTE This became a recurring issue, they try and process chip cards as a swipe, if their machine is enabled for chip and pin and they try and bypass it the card is declined, after a few times it will be blocked… as we discovered later in the trip. It’s not a problem if they just have a swipe machine, the is most common which is why it doesn’t happen everytime).

Paid up we headed out, a very weird experience and rubbish food to boot, not a good start!

We were both tired so we headed to bread talk and ordered a few pastries for tomorrows breakfast (cash only here)







I have no idea what either of them are, there were no english descriptions, but both were yummy (Ł1.30 each) :P

Despite our naps on the plane we were now both really tired. The parks opened at 8am the following morning and not knowing what to expect we wanted to be early so we hit the hay at 9.30 ready for a hopefully action packed day tomorrow!

[kevin_cambs_uk]

Interesting in china especially the part when you got out the airport

That I would find very disturbing but then luckily I have no desire to visit China but the report is brilliant
More please!

[vics18]

Yay glad you've started! Hotel looks so cute can't wait to read more

[amymiller]

Yay been looking forward to reading this.

Wow that is some crappy looking food provided by Emirates, would've expected more from 'the world's best airline'! The lemon cheesecake in-particular

Glad the girl with the backpack got her comeuppance, she sounds like a delight... Were there only squat toilets in Dubai airport? Sure i remember some 'normal' ones too.

Toy Story hotel looks delightful. Shame your evening meal wasn't a success, what a strange experience, not done well for food today!

Am planning a trip to Shanghai myself, but was put off by paying for the visas, didn't know about the free 144 hours so I think will have to leave until next year and team with somewhere else (probably Japan), not enough leave to squeeze into doing this year!

[Guest]

Yay you've started! Eventful day! There's normal toilets too in Dubai airport - I remember freaking out until I got pointed to the others! Boathouse is one to miss off our list! Hotel looks lovely! Think will take cash! Did you see the Dooney at Shanghai?

[Hannikins]

Originally Posted by kevin_cambs_uk

Interesting in china especially the part when you got out the airport

That I would find very disturbing but then luckily I have no desire to visit China but the report is brilliant
More please!

See more...

it was a bit, annoying like touts, they weren't aggressive in anyway though, just persistent in chasing you down :P

Originally Posted by vics18

Yay glad you've started! Hotel looks so cute can't wait to read more

See more...

on the way!

[Hannikins]

Originally Posted by amymiller

Yay been looking forward to reading this.

Wow that is some crappy looking food provided by Emirates, would've expected more from 'the world's best airline'! The lemon cheesecake in-particular

Glad the girl with the backpack got her comeuppance, she sounds like a delight... Were there only squat toilets in Dubai airport? Sure i remember some 'normal' ones too.

Toy Story hotel looks delightful. Shame your evening meal wasn't a success, what a strange experience, not done well for food today!

Am planning a trip to Shanghai myself, but was put off by paying for the visas, didn't know about the free 144 hours so I think will have to leave until next year and team with somewhere else (probably Japan), not enough leave to squeeze into doing this year!

See more...

Yes there are some, they just weren't any in the three toilets I tried. I ended up asking but then we were cuting it late for the flight

Originally Posted by princess_chazy

Yay you've started! Eventful day! There's normal toilets too in Dubai airport - I remember freaking out until I got pointed to the others! Boathouse is one to miss off our list! Hotel looks lovely! Think will take cash! Did you see the Dooney at Shanghai?

See more...

I didn't I'm afraid There probably is one I don't collect them though so wouldn't have noticed

[Nesbits]

Interesting first day, and a long one too, I'm not surprised you were exhausted. The food looks and sounds the worst.

Looking forward to more, never been east.

[DisneyDreamer81]

The Toy Story hotel looks so cute!

But that chicken you had has made me feel proper sad. I think the colour of it alone would have put me off

Can't wait to read more!