Traffic on the Huangpo River seen from our strateroom aboard the Rotterdam


Moss at the Maglev terminal in Pudong, Shanghai, about to board the train


Moss stands near the Maglev’s speed indicator; we are traveling at 301 kph!

View of Shanghai’s famous Bund from a construction overbridge; the Huangpo River is at left


Squeek and Moss beside the Huangpo River in Shanghai; the highrises of the newly developed Pudong District are in the background


One of the rabbit-warren streets in Shanghai’s Old Town district


Squeekie near the tea house where we stopped for tea in Shanghai’s old town

The tea house in the middle of the old town, with the bridges to it zig-zagged to divert evil spirits


Drinking Jasmine tea in the tea house

Shanghai’s night lights are dramatic and colourful


Forty-ninth Day (Monday, March 9, 2009)-- We awoke this morning to a foggy Shanghai and a Huangpo River bustling with traffic just outside our verandah. It was so nice to be back in our own “floating hotel,” the Rotterdam. While we were away in the interior of China the CEO of Holland-America, Stein Kruse, had come on to the ship and visited with the world cruisers. We knew of the planned visit, and had been disappointed to miss this meeting, but were pleased to learn that Mr. Kruse had decided to remain one extra day so that he could have breakfast with the people who had just returned from the China Overland Tour. So we came down to the Pinnacle Grill for breakfast with Mr. Kruse, his wife, and a number of the senior officers of Holland-America. We had a nice meal (thank heaven there was no more Chinese food!) and a good opportunity to converse with these officers. Fortunately, very few of the travelers took advantage of this meeting chance so we had an extended meeting. Squeekie was very happy!

After this we were on our own for the remainder of the day, until Rotterdam departed late this evening. Our first order of business was to take a taxi across the river into the Pudong District to the Maglev station to ride that special train to the airport and return. Shanghai became the first city in the world to build and operate a new rail technology known as “magnetic levitation,” or “maglev.” Initially invented by German scientists in 1932, maglev test tracks had operated in Germany and Japan in the post-World War Two era, but had never caught on for reasons that are debated among rail experts and enthusiasts. However, in the late 1990s the municipal government of Shanghai decided to build a 20-mile long “demonstration” maglev line out to their new international airport. The project cost approximately $1 billion (U.S.) and it has run for a decade with no problems.

We caught a taxi just outside our docking area, pointed on a map to the Maglev station at Longyang Road station in Pudong (the new part of Shanghai on the west shore of the river), and the driver indicated he would take us there. Unfortunately, as we got close to where the station should be, the driver indicated he did not know what we were trying to reach! He spoke almost no English, nor could he read a map without Chinese characters. Finally, Squeekie leaned out of the taxi, asked people on the sidewalk if they spoke English, and got someone who could talk to the driver. At just that moment, however, we saw the maglev train pass by on its elevated line in the distance, and pointed to that. We got to the station a few minutes later, and the taxi driver was so ashamed that he cancelled our meter rate, but we gave him a nice tip anyway.

The Longyang Road Station is a modern construction which looks like something at Tomorrowland in Disneyland. The ground floor contains what is labeled a “museum,” but what is really a sales pitch for the maglev technology. We entered the station (through an x-ray machine just like at an airport), bought our round trip ticket, and went up the escalator to the track level, where we took pictures and awaited the arrival of the train. Two maglev trains operate on this two-track line, and the point at where they pass (at speed) produces a loud “bang” as the trains (and their respective cones of speeding air) go by each other at over 600 kilometers per hour! When the train arrived we boarded and Squeekie sat at the window on the left side where the trains would pass, while I sat at the window on the right side, so I could photograph the elevated track structure as we traveled around curves. The train soon departed the station and quickly picked up speed. Within six minutes it was running at 301 kilometers per hour, as the picture in the blog tells! When the two trains passed there was an instant “bang!” as the cones of air passed by each other, and the trains had passed out of view before one could even react to this surprise. In less than ten minutes we had reached the airport at the outer end of the line.

We got off and explored the airport for a little while; Squeekie had been here with the Concordia Bell Ringers on their China Trip in 2005. Then it was back to the maglev and a return to Longyang Road Station. We toured the “museum” on the lower level, where I learned a great deal about the technology used in these trains (which run on cast concrete beams, not traditional steel rails). Then we caught another taxi to take us to our next stop, the Peace Hotel on the Bund in downtown Shanghai’s old “British Concession” district.

We walked along the Bund exploring the architecture of the old buildings still preserved there. Many have been restored in recent years and offer very good examples of architectural preservation. Unfortunately, when I tried to take a picture of an art deco ionic column in one building the guard there got very angry, as though I was plotting to rob the bank or something. Still, I was able to photograph the outsides of buildings and listened intently as Squeekie read their architectural histories to me. We spent a very interesting hour doing this, and then crossed over to the river embankment on the far side of the street (which was torn up in the construction of an extension of Shanghai’s underground metro train). We walked along the embankment looking at people and river traffic, and chatting about the buildings across the street (on one side) and across the river (on the other side). We bumped into people from the Rotterdam, had our picture taken together, and had the interesting experience of being accosted by two Chinese university students who were eager to practice their English on us. All in all, we had a very interesting early afternoon.

Then we caught another taxi to take us into the old town district of Shanghai. The taxi driver dropped us off at the edge of the district, but we had little idea of where we were because our map was not that good. Squeekie, when she was here in 2005, learned that there was a tea house inside the rabbit warren of alleyways which twist through the old town, and she wanted to go there for tea. We walked and walked and walked, curving around this complex and eventually found our way into its heart. There, in the middle of a man-made lake and reached by zig-zagging bridges (so built to deter evil spirits from following one into the tea house) was a lovely tea house built to Ming architectural standards. We walked in and told the lady on duty that we were interested in having some tea. She sat us down and proceeded to clean all of the potteryware she would be using. At first I thought this was some sort of complex ceremony, but now I realize that she was just using very hot water to clean cups, pots, and other items needed to brew the tea.

Behind her was a wall filled with large glass jars containing different types of tea. She asked us what we wanted and after some discussion we decided that two differing types of tea would suffice, an Oolong tea that was very mild and a Jasmine tea that had a stronger flavour. These are the teas we drank for the next hour. The Oolong was in a tiny, slightly larger than a thimble cuplet, and the Jasmine was in a larger cup, and she kept pouring refills as long as we had room in our stomachs to drink them. This was not a British tea with cookies or cakes, nor a Japanese tea with complex imagery, it was just drinking two differing types of tea whose flavours contrasted. It was lovely and VERY CHINESE. While we were drinking a young woman from South America came in and also ordered tea, and so we saw that what the lady had done for us was typical of what she would do for any customer. Neither Squeekie nor I wanted this event to be over, but the afternoon was getting late and we really needed to get back to the ship.

We finally, very reluctantly, departed from the tea house and worked our way through the warren to get out of the old town complex. We stopped to undertake a shopping errand, and then headed to the busy main streets outside old town. By now it was evening time and the city’s rush hour had begun, although we didn’t realize this at that moment. But when we caught a taxi and the driver grimaced when we told him where we needed to go, we began to understand that we faced a difficulty that even New Yorkers or Angelenos might not comprehend.

At this point I must stop and say that modern Chinese drivers have written a new chapter in the book on aggressive driving. All throughout our tour of China, from Hong Kong to Xian to Beijing to Shanghai, we saw repeated evidence that Chinese do not obey traffic laws or posted signs except under duress or when otherwise necessary due to the presence of armed traffic cops. They disobey red lights; they turn when they wish, even when oncoming traffic would cause a Western driver to think twice; they crowd across lanes or refuse to give way if someone is attempting to push in; they cross in front of traffic (if pedestrian) or, alternatively, aim at pedestrians if they are drivers. And all this is just in regular traffic. But now, this afternoon in Shanghai, we saw what it was like to drive in rush hour traffic, compounded by the fact that certain major streets downtown are torn up with metro construction. From the edge of old town to the terminal where Rotterdam was docked was, as the crow flies, a distance of about 1.5 miles. It took us over an hour and 45 minutes to cover that distance in the taxi. I specifically recall one left turn which took us over 20 minutes to negotiate. Eventually we did return to the dockside, with just a little more than an hour remaining until Rotterdam was to up anchor and depart.

So this was our day in Shanghai. It was interesting in the extreme, and both Squeekie and I would certainly wish to return some day, although I have no desire to struggle through its streets at the height of rush hour. Shortly after eight o’clock in the evening Captain Olav gently eased Rotterdam away from the dock and we left Shanghai behind. Our “China adventure” was at an end for this trip.

An historic note-- For those of you who have expressed dislike of my historical asides, I have decided to put this one at the end of this blog entry, so you can skip it if you wish, although I hope you will understand that historical and technical observations are part and parcel of how I look at everything in the world. . . . Shanghai was little more than a fishing village on the Huangpo River throughout most of the history of Imperial China, even though it had existed since the second century AD. In the nineteenth century the status of this town began to change. At the end of the Opium War (1839-42) China was forced to permit British (and later other European) traders and businessmen to undertake business in coastal towns other than Canton. Of these, the most important was Shanghai, which had river access into the interior of China and sported a very hood harbour area along the river. The Chinese Imperial government gave “concessions” first to the British, later to the French, the Germans, the Italians, and others to allow them to set up business communities in Shanghai. These concessions, each of which was a special land area in the town began to define the structure and functioning of the city, which grew rapidly due to the flourishing trade which developed here. (It must be noted that in each concession the laws of the specific great power were in effect, not the laws of China, and this meant that there were differing police forces throughout the city.) By 1900 Shanghai was unquestionably the most commercially active city in the Far East. In the British Concession along the Huangpo Riverfront there developed a commercial banking district that came under the German name of “The Bund,” which it retains to this day. By the 1920s many large and fanciful European-style buildings existed along the riverfront and in the various concession areas in town. Even the Chinese Civil War in the 1912-27 period did not end this business activity, even in the years of the Great Depression. (See Marlene Deitrich’s first American Movie, “Shanghai” to get a feel for what this city was like in the early 1930s.) Then in 1937 the Japanese began their war against China with a bombing of Shanghai, which soon was captured by the Japanese. They remained in control of Shanghai (and much else of coastal China) until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Then Shanghai, that temple of capitalism, was caught up in the Civil War between Communists and Democrats which ultimately led in 1949 to the Communist victory. Shanghai suffered as a result for its role in the capitalist economy made it a target of Communist “reforms” and hassling. However, with the revival of the capitalist economy in China at the end of the 1980s, Shanghai has seen a revival of spirit and economy. As my current blog pictures show, especially of the new area across the river known as Pudong, high rise structures tell of a revival of Shanghai’s spirit.