shanghai

I promised a slightly longer update on my trip and here it is (with pictures!)

As you know the trip there wasn’t exactly the smooth experience one hopes for when travelling.  I was held up in Auckland for an extra 18.5 hours while the airline fixed the engine of my original flight. 

Auckland airport – bored

After an 11.5 hour flight this gave me only about three hours shopping in Hong Kong instead of the entire day I was expecting 🙁 Luckily I know HK fairly well after being there about 6 times so I managed to get two Holga cameras (US 12 each!) and the L’occitane stuff for Vic.

The flight to Shanghai was only 2.5 hours and uneventful andI found myself in China early on Sunday evening.  Not much to report that night and here’s the view from my room when I woke up the next morning.

The next three days were filled with technical sessions from 08:00 until 18:00 with a gala dinner on Monday night and a cocktail party on the Wednesday.  The only night we had free was Tuesday and we spent that at a market about 20 minutes drive away.  The market was the usual Asian affair with loads of fake watches, clothing and DVD’s. I spent hardly any money there as there wasn’t anything I really wanted to buy.

The highlight was winning a digital camcorder on Wed night!  I’ve already sold it so I won’t go into it too much except to say it was pretty cool and I now have some extra cash

The only other time free was Thursday morning before our flight so a colleague and I went for a wander around the city center.  Not much to report as central Shanghai now looks like a lot of other Asian cities.  It has lots of new buildings and most of those have gone up in the last 7 years or so.

One of the first ones to be built was the garishly pink Oriental Pearl tower. This 468 meters high (1,536 feet) tower is the world’s third tallest TV and radio tower and was the tallest building in the city until a couple of years ago.

The Oriental Pearl tower

The trip back was uneventful with another cancelled flight out of Shanghai which luckily didn’t effect the HK-Auckland leg.

All in all the trip was OK at best and it was great to be home.  I really missed Vic and Max and it was made worse by the fact that Max said Daddy properly for the first time to me but it was on the phone from Shanghai!