Fortunately, we caught this one. I started reading Rant (Chuck Palahniuk's latest book), which has so far been awesome. I made quite a dent in it, because for no apparent reason at all, the train stopped just outside of Shanghai for two hours. Jessica's original explanation was that they were waiting for the express trains to go by, but there were no trains for at least 30 minutes at some times, and the train station was only about 10 minutes away. It sucked. No wonder everyone prefers express trains over the regular ones. Two fucking hours for no apparent reason.
We got there way behind schedule, and had only 30 minutes to get to the hotel room that we booked before we lost our reservation. This was a problem, because we didn't really know where the hotel was, and because it is the holiday, hotel rooms run out fast. It took Jessica's friend over 30 minutes of phone calls to find us this room, and she's not even a foreigner. So Jessica and I booted it through the subway as quickly as we could, but even as fast as we were going, 8 PM hit before we even exited the subway. We were getting stressed. Now it was possible we could find this hotel, and not even have a room.
Jessica wasn't even sure where the hotel was, and we had two possible stops where the hotel might be. We got off the second one, and just started asking directions to the road the hotel was supposed to be on. Turns out we did indeed get off at the right stop, and we found the street. Presented with a choice of left or right, I said right, she said left. We ended up going left, which lead absolutely no where. She then led us even further off track by taking a side street away from the street we were supposed to be on, because she was uncomfortable with how dark it was. We ended up stopping at a Kude, buying a map, and getting directions from two clueless women (who couldn't even find where they were), a drunk guy, and eventually a cab driver. The cab driver knew where it was, and drove us there. Lo and behold, my sense of direction wins again, it was literally about a 2 minute walk to the right of our original left/right choice. Oh well.
Turns out they still honoured our reservation, thankfully, and we booked our two rooms, and I slapped down the 700 yuan deposit. Eventually, we got Chris and Alex to catch up and join us at the hotel (although we had to walk them from the subway due to a mix of bad directions and them not listening to the directions in the first place). We all dropped off our stuff, and got something to eat. Finally, we were ready to catch up with Jessica's friend, Angie. Angie was the one who made the reservations in the first place. We met Angie at a row of bars (literally, just a street lined with one after another) around 1 AM.
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When presented with two options, choosing the opposite of your girlfriend is not a sense of direction. You have to know where something is or have seen it on a map or have some clue where you are to have a sense of direction. Being right when the odds are 50/50 means you're not supporting your girlfriend!
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