The family is happy to be back in Shanghai after a nice holiday in Holland. The flight back was more eventful than usual. Partly because of the kids, because although Scott slept well as usual, Elaine was wide awake for many hours and kept on talking and moving. And partly because of external factors: a few hours into the flight a flight attendant gave boiling water to a Chinese mother who wanted to make soup noodles on board, and spilled some over her young son (6 years old or so I guess).
The boy was in a lot of pain and screamed like crazy. Immediately the staff put him into the business clas kitchen right behind our seats, and he kept on screaming and crying there. After the boy had been treated with a special gel some Chinese who could not sleep joined the discussion between the mother and the KLM staff about who was responsible, I assume helping her to try to get some form of compensation. At that point I decided I heard enough and tried to ignore the noise and get some sleep.
But not for long, because one of the other passengers had an alarm clock in his or her luggage that went off at 5:30 AM and kept on going off. The person did not hear it, but I did. Problem was that I had no idea where the clock was and who the owner was, so I could not do much about it. All in all I got maybe 2 hours of sleep and when breakfast was being served around 8 AM I decided to just have some coffee and orange juice. I was too tired to eat.
At the airport it took us an hour to get our luggage. Normally Shanghai Pudong is fairly quick with baggage, but today that was not the case. Some passengers started to get angry about it and started discussions with the staff (who were of course clueless and unable or unwilling to find out what was happening), but luckily finally the luggage arrived. The driver was waiting for us at the exit of the airport and after that we were home fairly quickly.
In the afternoon I had a short sleep and then went for a swim with Scott. That’s was a good way to wake up! While sitting in the pool with Scott I did an interview with a Shanghai magazine. Because Scott was playing and there were no other kids (everybody is traveling right now it seems) he decided to shoot me with his water gun. Well, my old iPhone 4 could not handle that and the loudspeaker of the phone died while I was talking… Luckily I managed to repair it later by using a hair dryer to blow air at the iPhone for 5 minutes. It seems that often works when your iPhone gets wet, just don’t put it on very hot air.
And now it’s almost 11 PM and time to get some sleep!