It is better to deal with your plane tickets, your visa and the place where you will live at least on month before your departure.
To obtain informations about chinese visa just click on the following link :
http://www.amb-chine.fr/fra/zgzfg/zgsg/lsb/qzyw/
Pay attention to the number of entry if you want to travel in Asia and remember once back to China to report it to the Chinese police station.
Departure
I have chosen to take an Air France ticket (700 euros round trip) with a departure on Thursday June 2nd at 10:40 p.m. and an arrival at Pudong Airport in Shanghai at 4:15p.m the following day.
My first issue was that my suitcase's weight was unevenly distributed between my bag and my cabin bag (with Air France you must have 20 kg for cargo and 10 for the cab) so my journey began with the reorganization of my bags in Roisy! Then my brother, Coco (my neighbor) and I, shared my last french meal before Shanghai!
11 hours of flight later (during which I was beside Geliang Yu, a Chinese guy who has just returned from a PhD at Cambridge Univerity and with whom I talked both about China and Cambridge) I finally landed to Shanghai.
Arrival
Once in Shanghai, I took the Maglev, which is the fastest train in the world, it can goes up to 430km per hour and only cost 40 yuan to go from Pu pong Airport to Shanghai station (Longyang road) in 10 minutes.
Finally, I took a cab from the railway station to my hotel (for the first week I planned to stay at one of my mother's friend house in the french concession).
My surprise was that the taxi driver could not speak a word in English and even if I had made write in Chinese my address he was not able be understood me because he didn't know how to read chinese either!
Fortunately, I had print a map of the hotel on Google map and my plane's neighbor, after a 10 minutes talks, managed to make him understand my destination.
Approximately 20 minutes later (that cost me 50 quay which is 5 euro) the taxi stopped and made me a sign to tells me to get off the car. I looked around me ... nothing!
A young woman approached, I shown her my map and she indicated me a direction. I thus took all my luggages and walked to the street she just shown me, I was completly lost! 100 meters farher I saw the residence symbol, I had found it!!
There, Bisserka greeted me in her magnificent flat.
I settled down, we discussed and then we went to eat in a dumpling restaurant called the Yu Garden restaurant, it was delicious; I ate for the first time truffles!
Then I went to sleep exausted!