from icanhascheezburger.
after a hellish week with the cats travel preparations, this pic made me laugh. at moments i’ve been quite tempted to just pack the cats with my sweaters, but i’m glad things seem to be moving in the right direction now. fingers crossed!
i don’t do a lot of posts where i complain, but the cats saga is taking its toll on us. our return tickets were long booked on british airways, but if we knew it’d be such a nightmare to ship the cats home, i think we’d have chosen a more pet-friendly airline. say, lufthansa, where your cats fly with you in the cabin, saving you half the trouble.
the service on ba has been appallingly clueless. first they don’t fly the cats in cabin – only cargo. that’s fine, i guess. so what do we need? we call london, we call lisbon, we call shanghai: nobody’s got a straight answer, always ending up forwarding us to somebody else. in shanghai, they forwarded us to the logistics person who is supposed to know these things, but doesn’t have the foggiest idea… first we’re told they can’t ship them to lisbon, to which we reply “but why, if the flights we are flying in have cargo service as well?”, then they suddenly can, then we need extra documents – documents which the entity supposed to issue says we don’t need…
what are these people doing?! so far, this has been the most stressful issue of the whole move. we don’t want to leave them behind, and we surely don’t want to take them to the airport and suddenly realize we’re missing a paper! how hard can it be to figure out these procedures and get a clean algorithm, step by step?!
this is all i want. kthxbye.
ah, portugal. i’m missing your blue skies and cozy food already, but it’s good to be back to our shanghai headquarters, with two spoiled cats under our blankets.
the flights were long but thankfully uneventful, and i think i might have stumbled on the trick to flying reassurance – get the seats in front of the air hostess. they always smile to you and their air of someone who has done this a million times will do wonders for takeoff/landing stress. coincidently, they’re usually the best seats on the plane, so it’s a lovely two-in-one.
between our trip to portugal and the one back, ba changed their flight entertainment system to include many more programs that you can start/pause anytime you want. they now include tv series like dexter, the big bang theory, flight of the conchords, etc. which make a 11 hour flight much more pleasant.
also on way home, i’ve shot my first video with the neat little camera i got for xmas! it’s a tiny sony that makes me feel like the intrepid reporter i always dreamed to be :)
anyway, the video is from the maglev ride here in shanghai: a 30km stretch between the shanghai pudong airport and longyang metro station, in 7:30 at a top speed of 430km/h. it’s the fastest i ever traveled on earth, so i thought it might be fun to share!
ps – at 2:45, another maglev train crosses the one i am riding, so watch out for that. also, my editing skills are non-existent, since it’s the first time i actually “make” a video, so bear with me :)