4footers: 1st Shanghai Experience

So if you saw my previous post about Harrys bar then you know I was out late! We had planned to go to the SIP train station at 815 on Sat morning to head out for Shanghai. I woke up at 805 by a phone call from a co-worker. Rough start to the day. However, things got better. We got to the train station okay and purchased our high speed rail tickets. The train goes 280km/hour. There was 7 of us traveling to shanghai and only 5 of us were able to get on the 1st train and two others (Eric and Gary) had to take the 2nd train which was 10 mins behind ours.

The train ride is smooth and awesome and we got to shanghai in 25mins. Coming out of the train it looked like the picture below

We waited for 10-15 minutes and no Eric or Gary. Luckily we all have cell phones so we gave them a call. For the next 1hr we tried to help guide them out of the train station to the street and could not. We decided to give up and told them to get in a taxi and call our local contact who could tell the cab driver in chinese how to get them to a location where we could meet them. We then headed out on our adventure

First stop Pearl Tower: It is one of the most recognized landmarks in all of Shanghai. We bought a ticket for 180RMB to go to the top of the tower.

The tower is higher than the Sears tower and the tokyo tower. From the top you could see very far and it was really cool. It overlooked the river and the finanical district. Such an enormous city.

In order to see out the windows someone obviously has to clean them. This is 380meters up in the air and there was a window washer on the outside of the building strapped on by a bungee cord washing windows. No way in heck would I want that job.

Then we found out that we get to go outside as well (not just the window washers). They had a glass floor observation deck that we went to. We still had not met up with Gary and Eric yet so we took their pic so they knew what they were missing. A bunch of random chinese people wanted to take their pictures with us too. The picture below shows what its like to be standing 380 meters int he air and looking straight down to the ground through glass.

Random chinese people asking us for our pictures.

After we finished our experience at Pearl tower we started to head for the shopping district. We still hadn't heard from gary and eric so we thought we would take their photo on the subway

We made it to the shopping district. The subways are quite easy to navigate and relatively inexpensive. Just like tokyo or chicago in my opinion. Next up was a quick beer to prepare for the shopping. We also met up with our friend from work Ling Sun. Still no Gary and Eric so we let them have a beer with us via photo.

Finally at the completion of our beer Gary and Eric arrived and we got the whole story of their adventure. They got on the wrong train, took it to the airport, couldn't find their way out once arrived and ultimately ended up getting in a taxi and just driving. They had no idea where they were going until they got ahold of Ling sun who speaks mandarin and got the taxi to bring them to an area where we could all meet. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening shopping and sightseeing. Shanghai is a really cool place with tons of stuff to do.