Shanghai, People's Republic of China - Part 1

 

As I write this brief commentary, it’s Monday morning, 5:15. We arrived here Friday evening at 10:00, & it’s been non-stop for the past two days. We sail at 4:30 this afternoon – our final tour begins at 9:00 this morning, which is a second trip on a bullet train. Our first ride was on Saturday – a 1-hour trip (including 4 station stops) that took us about 250 miles north of Shanghai. Today’s bullet train trip is a ride on China’s latest technology – a vehicle that runs on a magnetic cushion of air and reaches speeds north of 450 mph. Needless to say, we’re both very excited about this opportunity. I’m going to try and videotape the ride and if I can, upload it into this blog when we reach Hong Kong in two days. I can’t do it while sailing because the internet is too slow, so will need a land-based connection.

Between the two of us, we’ve taken over 800 photos here in Shanghai. I plan to use most of the next two days (sea days) recapping, processing & posting. This is the most amazing city we’ve ever visited, and will be a challenge to describe. The activity is almost dizzying – the city never sleeps and the crowds are unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Equally, the people have been very nice to us despite the language barrier, and believe me, we’ve had some challenges. Just buying our future daughter-in-law two small containers of tea was like playing a game of charades with the store owner. We didn’t have our language translator with us, so trying to identify & ask for vacuum-packed (required by the ship) tea that tasted good was quite comical, and we’re still not sure if it’ll taste good! That said, if we pointed to a particular tea variety and the store clerk pinched her nose, we knew it was bad…so we’ll see how Shana likes it! 

We’re missing our youngest grandson’s birthday back in Charlotte. All the kids and their families (except oldest son, Chris) will be there to celebrate. We love & miss you all dearly…and Braydon, happy first birthday! And congrats to our youngest son, Bryan. He participated in “Bridge Day” up in Virginia – his 5th consecutive year jumping from a tall bridge. Based on his Facebook post yesterday, he landed safely though it sounds like it could’ve been a little smoother.

So, just a few photos here today, but many more to come as we sail toward Hong Kong. As an aside, we’ve been on pins & needles monitoring the protests there. We normally dock just adjacent to the downtown area where the protestors & police have been clashing for the past month. If things get much worse over the next 2 days, we could potentially cancel our stop, although there are about 150 passengers scheduled to leave the ship in Hong Kong, with an equal number of new passengers scheduled to board. We’ll see what happens.