I love you, China Eastern Ticket taker.
 
June 30 & July 1, 2004(LAX to Shanghai)
We spent most of June 30 at the airport. We arrived at LAX at 11 a.m. all set for our flight that left at 1:10 to discover that it was actually leaving at five. $10 meal vouchers to make up for the delay, though! I was assuaged since I'm easily bought. To kill time, Erik, Alex (my fabulous cousin who is a month younger than Erik and was the sugar to his salt), Jenny (the niece of a family friend who traveled with us and my buddy on the trip), and I played cards with duty-free M&Ms are currency. When life gives you lemons...
 
We were traveling on the world famous China Eastern Airlines, and I was bucking up for a long cramped excursion--a sweet 12.5 hours. As my mom handed our bundle of three boarding passes to the ticket agent when we were about the board, he informed her that "our seats had to be changed." Vague, but he couldn't give us more information, but he assured us that these seats were better. Our seats before were all the way in the back of the plane. As we stepped away from him, though, he threw out "You're SO going to love me for this."
 
We checked out the new tickets and BUSINESS CLASS, BABY! My mom, my aunt and I sat up there, and it was awesome. There was so much room in front of my seat that I had to unbuckle my belt and get up to get the stuff from the seat pocket in front of me. I could fully recline my seat to about a 160 degree angle. I had my own personal TV screen that I could pull out of the seat arm rest and watch as many movies and TV shows and play as many games as I wanted. They had prosciutto was an appetizer. The seat next to me was empty so I had my entire island to myself. The bathroom was ALWAYS empty and spotless. I went to bathroom about nineteen times in order to take advantage. The boys were still in economy, and my aunt smuggled our Haagen-Daaz ice cream cups and fancy chocolates back to them. At one point, Alex came up to see his mom and check it out and he got promptly kicked out by the flight attendant since no classless economy peons are allowed beyond the velvet curtain.
 
July 1st was a complete wash, since we arrived at Shanghai Pudong airport at 10:30 at night. I popped off of the plane relatively refreshed since I had managed several hours of sleep in my Chair O' Luxury, and we met up with the rest of our group who were looking a bit more bedraggled. Erik and Alex looked as if they had been were run over by cars.  
 
The plan was to meet up with a rep from our travel service who would drive us to meet our boat, which had moved away from Shanghai by the time we arrived. We were all thinking that the trip would be a couple of hours but we were quickly disabused of that notion, as the trip would in fact be four hours. Sweeeet. It was a pretty smooth ride, though, and around 2:30 a.m., we pulled into a dimly lit dock in some city which I can't recall, and hauled our suitcases onto the Victoria Rose, the smallest of the ships on the Victoria Cruise line.
 
My mom and I were bunk mates and we found our cabin to be a sweet little nook, outfitted with two twin beds (no honeymoon suite, this one), a tiny bathroom and shower, a closet and a TV that showed Chinese music videos and HBO Asia, all with a window that looked out onto the water.  Here's a shot of part of the room.