Shanghai!

In November, I went to Shanghai for a week (for work). It was hectic at work and I didn't have time to do anything. When I printed out my boarding passes, I neglected to see that they were being sent to the marketing printer, in color, and on 11x17 paper. They sat in the printer all afternoon, so everyone walking past got a chuckle and gave me a hard time. The TSA agents also got a kick out of them.

The trip from Lincoln to Minneapolis to Seattle to Shanghai takes about 24 hours to complete. The flight across the Pacific is 13 hours. There's a 10 hour time shift; the jetlag makes for a swirly trip. By the end of the week, I was sleeping thru the night, only to return home for another 10 hour time warp. We got home on a Saturday night at 10 PM and had all day to recover Sunday.

Once we got thru immigration and customs, we took the Maglev train at 300 kph (188 mph) for 8 minutes (it's only a prototype section of rail line) to another station where we tried out the Shanghai subway for the first time. From there it was 45 minutes to the station closest to our hotel on Nanjing Road, which is a beautiful pedestrian walkway. By the time we got there our heads were spinning.

We on a Saturday night. Sunday, we went on a three-hour walking street food tour with a group of six other tourists. It was awesome food, and we got to see a little bit of China away from the neon lights of where we were staying. After the tour, we took the subway to the old original part of Shanghai. There was a ton of shopping, plus we toured the Yu Garden, a 17th century retreat built by a city patriarch. From Yu Garden, we walked to the riverfront and gawked at the buildings. The building on the right in the photo below is the Shanghai Tower. At 2,000 feet in height, it dwarfs the others that are still actually taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago. The building with the hole in it is 1,600 feet tall!!

Monday we visited a supplier north of the city and continued on to Nantong to see another supplier on Tuesday. From there, we drove five hours south to Hangzhou, where the G20 summit was held a couple months earlier. I went there last year and was amazed at the improvements that had been made in one short year. From Hangzhou, we did a day trip to Ningbo to visit a casting supplier and machine shop. 

To get back to Shanghai, we took a bullet train at 180 mph to the Hongqiao train/airport/subway station and then took the subway from there back to the hotel. Last time I was there, a seasoned China traveler advised me that the secret to traveling is to go superlight: "Book your hotels with at least two nights so that you can get clothes cleaned." We had a one-night stay in Nantong, so instead of packing only two sets of clothes, I had to pack three. Everything fit easily into a normal sized carry-on bag. We didn't have to check any bags on the airlines, and the smaller size really helped out when navigating the subways and sidewalks.

We arrived back in Shanghai to our original hotel on Thursday afternoon. Every night since we arrived, we had eaten like kings as the guests of our suppliers. Every lunch was a huge meal, as was every dinner. We were tired of eating twenty different foods at each meal. so when we had the opportunity to eat on our own, it was simple noodles.

In Shanghai, there are a fair amount of Westerners, but not a lot. Along the waterfront everyone is a tourist, and everyone is taking selfies with the tall buildings in the background. Trying to be polite, we would try to get out of people's selfie backgrounds. We were surprised that people would move to keep us in their picture frame - they wanted us in their pics. Once we figure this out, we had fun posing with the locals in their selfies and snapshots.

Friday after we visited our final supplier, we packed up for the return journey the next morning and then took our Chinese corporate colleagues out for dinner. This time it was on us: PIZZA! We found an authentic Italian place on the rvierfront that served up so very tasty pizza and microbrew beer. Our Chinese friends were shocked to learn that we (Americans) eat cheese daily. Dairy isn't a food group there.

As I mentioned, we got around everywhere via subway. It took a couple minutes the first time to figure out how it all works, but from then on, it was cruiser. The trains and stations were clean and safe (and sometimes crowded) and we treated each ride as an adventure.

Additional photos are on Google Photos in an album here: China Album