Strangers in a Strange Land, Day 1

Ignoring the query of a young woman who asked us if we needed a taxi (why would we? A friend was meeting us), we deposited ourselves and our five bags in a small heap across the concourse from the exit of the baggage area. Only a few dozen people milled around the cavernous, harshly modern terminal. There were a couple of small seating areas, a souvenir stand, a couple of pay phones and an information desk in view. Through the high windows we could see the gray sky outside but not much else. After a few minutes of scanning the crowd trying not to look as anxious as we felt, and trying not to feel as anxious as we did, we slowly came to the conclusion that we had not just missed our connection in the crowd; he simply wasn’t there.

The question of why we had not been met had some relevance to what we would do next. What if Greg was just running a little bit late but would be there shortly? What if something was wrong, and either he or his family was in distress of some kind? Shoot, we could help them through it, be their friends in need, look after the kids, whatever was needed. Like the parent of a child who has stayed out later than expected, we could not help our thoughts from ranging far afield in irrational directions.

It brought to mind Billy Crystal’s musings in “When Harry Met Sally” about why Meg Ryan did not answer the phone when he called. He figured it could only be three circumstances: she was not home, she was home but did not want to talk to him, or she was home and desperately wanted to talk to him but was trapped under something heavy. After walking up and down the concourse for a while, unable to conjure up any familiar faces, we concluded that we found ourselves in some sort of variation of option C. We decided to take matters into our own hands.

My Papa bear instincts kicked in. I convened a brief informal family meeting, telling all of us (including myself) that the good news was that we had made it safely all the way to China, we had all of our luggage, we had some cash, credit cards, and smarts. We could take care of ourselves if we had to with no problem at all. I think they believed me.

That’s not to say we did not have some obstacles to overcome. We knew Greg’s address and his phone number. Of course, that critical information was still trapped on the dead iPhone. Our options narrowed to three: hire a taxi to take us to some random hotel in the city somewhere and work out our next move from there; hire a taxi to take us straight to the US Consulate and find Greg that way; or somehow revive the iPhone, retrieve our contact information, call Kate, straighten everything out and get on with our day.

Preferring to stick as close to the original plan as possible, I set out in search of an open electrical outlet so that I could get Greg and Kate's phone number and figure out what was going on. I finally found one near the end of the concourse, down by a Burger King (America’s cultural reach is equidistant with its grasp). I could not get the adapter to work with the outlet, however. Searching literally high and low from our base camp overlooking what appeared to be a completely vacant floor below, I spied another outlet down the escalator from where we were. I slipped downstairs and, after furtively looking for anyone observing me, I jammed the adapter into the outlet, this time with enough force to get it to work. Fearing that these could be the last moments of my iPhone’s life but knowing I had nothing to lose, I plugged the iPhone in.

Success!

The screen lit up with the “you let me run all the way down to empty, you moron” dead-battery charging icon. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Impatient, I gave the phone just a few minutes of charge before taking off. The phone was a little balky, but eventually it fired back up as normal. Before the phone had a chance to die on me again (perhaps forever), I went into the Notes application and scrawled Greg’s address and phone number in pen onto my hand. Flush with success, I dashed back upstairs with our contact information triumphantly tattooed on my flesh.

We figured the best option was to use one of the payphones nearby. I attempted to make a call using my credit card, but the phone was only for international calls and I was trying to make a call across town. Thankfully, the phone right next to it was for local calls. Frustratingly, it did not take credit cards.

I began to feel like a character in an old Infocom adventure game, pushing every wall looking for secret doors to find random, hidden objects necessary to solve a multi-element puzzle that would open the next level of the game. I went over to the information desk and inquired about the local phone. The girl at the desk spoke enough English that we could communicate (yay!). She informed me that the phone would not take credit cards, and would not take cash (boo!), but would take a phone card. Conveniently, she sold the selfsame phone card (yay!). As I scrambled eagerly for my wallet, she also informed me that she took neither credit cards nor American dollars (boo!) I would need to pay for the phone card with Chinese money, of which we collectively had precisely none (boo!). These games never leave you without a way out -- the young lady pointed out that at the other end of the concourse, there was a money exchange (yay!). Weary of the chase, I sent Cheryl down to change some of our cash for Chinese RMB so that we could buy the phone card to use the local phone to call our friends to have them pick us up from the airport after our 22 hour journey.

After a surprisingly long wait in line, Cheryl came back – without any cash. For some reason, they needed passports. Another fifteen minutes later Cheryl returned with the cash. Amused only in passing by the benevolent gaze of Chairman Mao regarding me from each piece of currency, I returned to the information desk to obtain the precious 50-yuan phone card. Eagerly unwrapping the card like a three-year-old on Christmas morning, I dashed back across to the local payphone – which was in use by another lost family. Or rather, they’re poking at it, trying to figure out how it worked. I had been traveling far too long, and was too close to the end of our troubles to explain to them the intricate system of phone cards and money exchanges necessary to get the phone to function. Finally, as they moved on, I inserted the card, dialed the eight digit number into my hand, and looked forward to hearing the lovely voice of our friend Kate.

The phone was answered by a Chinese woman who spoke no English. Uh oh. ”Is Kate there?” “No Kate, no Kate.” It was impossible to sort through the linguistic subtleties: was there no Kate at this location at all? Or no Kate at that moment, which meant that there was a Kate at that location sometimes, which meant that we had the right number?

Now we wondered if even the contact information was wrong. I went back downstairs to juice up the iPhone again, to make sure I had not written the number down incorrectly. Just as I was about to step onto the escalator, one of the omnipresent state police got on ahead of me. He wandered slowly across the floor of the otherwise abandoned level to a solitary chair unaccountably placed in the middle of the room, and sat down. Why? I have no idea. I determined, after casing the immediate area by pretending to look at a poster advertising the Expo 2010, that if I pressed up against the wall where my electrical plug was, I would be just out of sight around a corner from this lone armed arm of the State. Trying to look as inconspicuous as a doughy 6 foot 1 inch white guy in jeans could look on the tile floor of an otherwise unoccupied level of a Chinese airport, I reconnected with the People’s Glorious Powerplant and brought the iPhone back to life once again.

This time, I figured I would just use the iPhone and call whomever I needed to in order to get us out of here. I had expected I would not use my phone for either voice or data on the trip, so all of its communication functions were off, and I had not bought an international calling plan. Willing to pay the price for an international call under these circumstances, I took it off of airplane mode to activate the phone function. If you have been paying attention, you know that it should go without saying tha I could not get phone service. Anywhere in the concourse. And then the phone died again. One step forward, one step back. Any way we cut it, we had no way of contacting our hosts. We were truly on our own.

We decided that we had no choice but to try to get a taxi to take us to Greg and Kate’s house. Making a total guess about the taxi charges, we figured we did not have enough cash, so back we all went to the money exchange. Not wanting to waste more time in the slow-moving exchange line, we stepped up to an ATM conveniently located next door. It refused my card. Back to the exchange line. In a sterling example of the efficiency of government workers who have no profit motive, the wait was interminable as the people behind the glass shuffled endless stacks of paper, left their posts, and generally tried to draw out my agony longer than I thought possible. When I finally got to the front of the line, the clerk added to the indignity by contemptuously throwing back my last twenty. It had a slight tear, and he would not accept it. Terrific.

After two hours, we had no ride, no more American money, no confidence that we had our hosts’ phone number, and no idea where they lived other than an address. We walked back to the phones, figuring Cheryl could try this time to call once more. It is entirely possible that I had botched the numbers somehow. We passed another young lady asking us if we needed a taxi. This time (and remembering ruefully the other taxi stringer we confidently blew off long before), we let her know we might be back. The local phone was in use, so we trudged further off down the concourse to yet another local phone. This time, there was no answer at all. Taxi time.

At that moment, a friendly young man in a suit materialized at our side asking if we needed a taxi, or better yet, a minivan. Our time of reckoning had come. I had written down our intended destination on a clean sheet of binder paper taken from Kelly’s journal. He took a look at and sucked in the air through his teeth, saying “oh, Hong Qiao Road, that’s really long.” I did not realize that the road traverses about half of the width of Shanghai itself. I did not have any other landmarks to go on. It took some time to convince him that we were going to a house, not a hotel. Nevertheless, he assured me that he could get us there; even better, he was willing to do so for a set price. After a brief negotiation, we settled on the equivalent of about $70. I knew almost nothing about where we were, but I did know that the airport was quite a distance from the city itself. Knowing that it would cost about that much to get from LAX to our old home in Glendale, which I estimated to be equivalent in terms of distance and traffic (and doing my best to calculate the conversion rate instantly), I figured that would be okay, even though it would use up most of our available cash.

Our spirits were lifted, bouyed to finally be on our way … somewhere. We tried not to think too much about the implications of getting into an unmarked minivan with two men who did not speak English who seem to have only a vague notion of where we were trying to go, spurred on by their boss, who had charged our trip to our credit card (hallelujah!) with a mobile credit card reader. I was still unable to give them any information other than the basic address. However, I did make it known that we were visiting an American diplomat working at the US Consulate. That bit of information probably saved us a good deal of trouble.

After the driver put all of our bags in the back of the Buick minivan by going over the backseat because the tailgate did not open, we shut the doors and headed out into the midday Shanghai haze. The excitement of finally arriving in China had long since worn off, as had the panic-driven adrenaline of learning that we would have to get ourselves around this massive foreign city. We did not have enough energy left to worry about where the taxi might eventually take us. If anything started to go sideways, I figured, we could simply demand that they take us to the US Consulate. That was enough comfort to allow me to relax and start to enjoy the strange land we had entered at long last.