Shanghai + Disney

I begin with apologies about the formatting....half of this was written voice to text and when I transferred it over and joined it with what I had here, the formatting didn't match. I know I could fix it, but I'm behind on what I need to record so for now, I'm going to leave it as is.

Because we were waiting for visas in December 2021 and trying not to accumulate 'stuff', we gave the girls a trip to Shanghai Disney for Christmas.  Thinking that our departure was just around the corner, it seemed like a perfect gift. But then of course, our visas did not arrive until March.  And then there was quarantine. And the Shanghai lock down. And then there was amped up testing, then difficulties traveling outside of the city. And then difficulties even traveling within the city.  So Shanghai Disney did not ever happen.  After things opened up we tried to hammer out some dates when we could go but there was always conflict. However, Tom and I finally made good our gift in February of 2023. Better late than never, but the girls did let us know that we were very tardy on the gift! 

To ensure that we did not have trouble in Shanghai, Jacky arranged for our driver to take us there (Wang Jian

is actually a company employee so not available to us all of the time).  While Tom gets us around really

quite well it was nice to have a driver so we could go straight from the hotel to and from Disney without

having to use public transport or wait for a taxi. You might wonder what does Wang Jian do all day while

we were at Disney?  We bought him a ticket and he came in with us! Before he met us he'd never been to

Shanghai, so of course he hadn't ever been to Disneyland.  After all Wang Jian is becoming part of the

family, so it's only right that he join us. 

Hotels in China, are very interesting. The maximum you can have is three to a room. Jacky tells us that

we don't need to follow that--as with all things in China, rules are only guidelines to work around.  If we

were Chinese, we likely could get away with only getting one room, but we always have to show our passport so

there's no way to dodge this. So everywhere we have gone we've had to get two rooms. Two rooms have

been nice because the beds are only one meter wide, so it's much more comfortable to have two rooms

anyway. However, when Wang Jian comes with us, we don't want to get three rooms, so we give him one

of the rooms and all four of us sleep in one room. As you guessed:  we slept two people in the one meter

beds. Not especially comfortable, but it’s a great deal for Wang Jian! 

The night before going to Disney, we met up with Jacky and his wife Daisy.  It was Tom's birthday and they

treated him to a very nice birthday dinner.  We walked around and took a few pictures.

The first picture is a popular place to place your phone, turn on a timer and get a picture with Shanghai's 3 tallest

buildings.  They call them 'the three beauties'.  The tallest has 128A floors. That is the one we ate dinner in,

but we only went to the 4th floor because it cost $30 per person to go up to the top. We did go up to the

52nd floor of one of them. 

The next day at Disney we killed ourselves off.  We bought early entry passes and hurried in (we still waited 40 minutes for the first ride!).  And we stayed through the second set of fireworks.  We put in more than

28,000 steps.  We suffered a bit the next day, but it was fun!

One nice thing about Disney was that it felt a bit like we were back in the US.  There is a fair amount of

shoddy construction in China and many things are made to look good from the outside, but internally it is

not safely constructed.  But it was clear that Shanghai Disney was constructed and maintained using

Western standards.  It was nice.  And gave me much food for thought on that metaphor of constructing

a sturdy life that can weather storms and endure some abuse and still function as designed.  It's not good to just look

good from the outside.

In China, you don't need life jackets or need to sign waivers to ride in a canoe.  That is Wang Jian right

behind Tom and me.

It was actually a really great thing to have Wang Jian with us because Tom's app wasn't working well,

so WJ navigated us on his phone. (The Chinese version worked so much better.)

We took a break in the late afternoon.  You can see my knee in the foreground, then Greta's, then

Tom, Tessa and Wang Jian.  Which one of these is not like the other?  Hint:  he doesn't have his legs up...

All in all, a very great Christmas present--especially for Wang Jian!  I think he's thankful to be part of an

American family!