Posts Tagged “Shanghai”
My wife Antipatika had already posted an entry about our trip to the Shanghai Oceanarium. However, I already had some photos cropped and watermarked so I’m still doing my own post. Having said that, I won’t go into further details of the trip, I’d rather rant about the crowd instead.
Just one of the clearer photos I got from hundreds of blurred shots. Taken at the far end of the 2nd tunnel.
Skyline Penguins Fly
May 1, Labor Day, is a National Holiday in China, however it fall on a Thursday. The following Friday was not declared a holiday so the people should still go back to work the next day. If it turned out to be a Friday, it would explain the sudden apparition of an enormous crowd, but it’s not. I could only hope that the Chinese denizens really had a thing about commemorating national holidays because if not, why not just storm the parks and tourist spots on a regular weekend. Weekends are always consists of two days – Saturdays and Sundays – and the whole world knows that. Though there are cases that someone had to render overtime work and most often that not, it had to be done on Saturdays. That only means they still have all Sundays to do the site-seeing on countless parks and other attractions. What’s the need to do that on May 1, of 2008?
A Chinese friend once asked why when foreigners come to China, they would always and most often only wanted to see the Great Wall in Beijing. My response and explanation was rather simple – because when you’re outside China, you’re only aware of The Great Wall because it’s dubbed as one among the Seven Wonders of the World. Inside China however, critics place Hangzhou’s West Lake in the number one slot for tourist destinations.
Our decision to visit Hangzhou (as opposed to visiting Beijing) has been a rewarding experience. Of course, there were a lot of things that we may have missed in Beijing (the Great Wall, the Great Pandas, et. al.) however, the beauty of Hangzhou, the West Lake and the so many sites around it are more than enough to compensate for what the China’s capital may have in store for us.
Due to the fact that railway tickets are usually being released to the public as early as ten days prior to the actual departure and the fact that May 1 is one of the major holidays in China, the tickets were almost depleted when we went to buy our tickets at Shanghai railway stations a the weekend before the Labor Day. Fortunately though, the supposedly smiling but already frowning English speaking ticketing staff has managed to find us seated tickets bound for Hangzhou at 3:00 in the afternoon of May 1.
Since our train tickets were issued in Shanghai, it only follows that we should board the trains in Shanghai. So Wednesday afternoon, I went to buy our Shanghai-bound tickets from the Kunshan Railway Station. I managed to secure us tickets scheduled at 7:30 in the morning of May 1. Perhaps there has been a little misunderstanding between me and the ticketing staff since I asked for 10:00 AM tickets (pronounced as SHI in Chinese) but maybe the lady heard my words as CHI (which means seven). Anyway, I thought it would be alright. At least we could avoid the holiday rush by leaving the place earlier.
I first learned about the MagLev train in Shanghai from my house mate Liu Lin. According to him, it travels at 400km/h from Longyang to Pudong Airport in 7 minutes. My wife confirmed through an article she read from Smile Online – Cebu Pacific’s online magazine, though I can’t find the article now.
I took the MagLev train this afternoon because I will have to pick up my wife in Pudong Airport at 11:45PM today (the flight is too late because it’s a Cebu Pacific flight) and apparently, the 400km/h speed is but a rumor, a press release or any other form of falsities you could think of (and yes, I’m exaggerating). But I was watching the speed meter display inside the train and the fastest constant speed it attained is only 301kp/h. But yeah, the travel only lasted approximately seven minutes.
