Let the (masked) Journey Begin......

It seems as though no matter how many times you travel, the airport madness never ceases to amaze. There is always commotion, whether it be extremely stressed out moms (lugging 7 suitcases, 3 toddlers, and a husband), a businessman seemingly always in an impatient mood, those headed on vacation with beach hats and flip flops in the dead of winter, or the solo backpacker in their elephant pants and backpack 3 times the size of their own bodies (guilty as charged on many occasions). But nothing can quite prepare you for the madness of an airport filled with people desperately trying to escape a virus that is both highly contagious and extremely unpredictable.

Let me just make one quick *amendment* to my previous post though by saying that everyone in China during this time was actually in 1 of 2 places. 1) Home (as previously stated) where they were told to remain for an indefinite amount of time. Or 2) At the AIRPORT.  And yep you guessed it we were graced with the presence of about half of the city’s population in Pudong International Airport (not lying, check out the video below!)

                                                                           

 Luckily one of my closest and dearest friends traveled from Shanghai to Malaysia the day before us and was able to give us the 4-1-1 on what to expect.  Because if she hadn’t, I’m not sure we would have made it through. First of all, we were told to arrive 4 hours before our flight because there were insane lines not only for check-in, but also to get through customs, security, and to your gate.  We were told to expect serious delays and to be prepared with masks and loads of hand sanitizer.  Fortunately, we had ordered extra masks to Shanghai while we were in Taiwan, because the entire 7 days we were isolated in Shanghai, all masks everywhere were completely sold out.

After checking in and Kolja scoring us emergency exit seats (somehow when he does the talking, we get great seats, but never vice versa). We braced ourselves for a massive line leading to the customs area.  I must say for the virus being so new and no one really knowing how to prevent/detect it, the system for monitoring everyone’s temperatures was as organised as could be.  Our temperatures were checked at least 3 times, again by the lovely airport staff stuck working their long shifts in hazmat suits, and finally about 2.5 hours laters we were hopping on the shuttle to the new recently built terminal in Pudong Airport.

One thing to keep in mind, that now more and more people in the world are becoming aware, is that wearing a mask and trying your very best not to fidget or touch it is extremely difficult. Now, add on the fact that this virus was so new at the time we didn’t know how easy it was to contract, so we were PARANOID on top of it.  At that point we were on hour 4 of wearing them and hadn’t even boarded the plane yet, and might I add they’re not very comfortable if they’re proper N95 filtered masks.

Honestly the airport in Shanghai was scary but we knew what to expect, so in the end not all that bad. We took off on time and arrived in Kuala Lumpur about 6 hours later. Now on hour 11 of mask wearing, we were hangry (because we were too afraid to take off our masks and eat during the flight), dehydrated (because of the masks again), and tired!!

The absolute worst part of the whole trip though was arriving in KL.  We had just come from Shanghai where everyone was overly cautious, sanitary, and the workers were checking our temperatures left and right, and landed in an airport of chaos, with no one wearing a mask, excess people close to each other and maybe I was just hypersensitive and paranoid but there also seemed to be people coughing all over the place.  We couldn’t wait to get the heck out of the airport.


Finally, after swiftly yanking our one trusty yellow suitcase (that we packed about 5 outfits each in, thinking this wouldn’t be that long of a getaway) off the belt, we bulleted out of the airport and hopped into a taxi.  The second we hopped in we threw off our masks FREEDOM, the back of my ears were rejoicing from the constant yanking and chaffing. But wait for it.....

The cheery driver asks us where we’re going and we give him the address, to which he continues the typical getting to know you questions and tells us the drive will be about an hour.  Then, the daunting question we hadn’t prepared for, “so where are you guys coming from?”.  Kolja and I looked at each other and hesitated.  He gave the answer at last.... “umm Shanghai”.  Take one guess what the driver did..... he turned around confused, looking back and forth at both of us then immediately put a mask on, sanitised his hands, and gave a muffled “oh no” reply.  We felt very guilty after that and immediately put our masks back on for his sake *cue wincing and ear pain* and from there commenced the silent hour long taxi ride to our first Airbnb in Kuala Lumpur..................


This post represents the events of January 31, 2020.