Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 2

Just to get a sense of the city ... Shanghai has 23 million people in 2,717 sq miles and is the most populous city in the People's Republic of China. In comparison, the entire state of Texas had 25 million and New York had a little over 19 million in the 2010 census. Size-wise, it is around the size of Deleware (2489 sq miles) which has a population of just under 900,000 people. The two airports are (by looking at the map) on opposite sides of Shanghai, and they are listed as 60 KM or a bit over 37 miles. Needless to say, we get a bit of exercise walking. Even the metro stops are a pretty good distance apart.

This week was a more "normal" week in most cases, since we went to the office the whole week with the exception of Wednesday when our US air shipment arrived. The shipment arrived and was delivered on Wednesday, all 11 pieces (8 boxes, 1 clothes drying rack, and 2 golf bags). We got everything unpacked in about 15 minutes, since the majority were clothes. We had 1 box of books, 1 box of kitchen items, and 1 box of miscellaneous other things. We've gotten all of the closets filled up now ... the closet in the bedroom holds our "summer" clothes while the winter clothes are split (Susan's in one, Tom's in the other) in the other 2 closets. We do still have some drawers empty and a couple shelves open in the office, so we did a bit better than I thought we would. The kitchen is really where we lack space, specifically no pantry area, so we are using one of the closets that has a shelf to house some of the non-perishable items.

Saturday we ventured for our first Shanghai haircuts. We had a salon recommended to us by one of the ladies that Susan met at a "Ladies Happy Hour". Mind you ... she had attempted to join the "American Women's Club of Shanghai" at their happy hour on Thursday nights .. and ended up "crashing" on a group of mostly British ladies. They are all very nice although I seem to be one of the few who works here. There was another one this week that taught Science at one of the schools here, but we are the minority it would seem. Anyway ... one of the ladies had recommended this one salon, which just happens to be next door to the Carrefour, so we headed over there today. It is owned by a British woman who moved here 9 years ago. Most of the people, if not all, who worked there were Asian, but they all seemed to speak at least a little English, and the owner was there so we could very easily speak with her. Susan had mentioned to her a minor "problem" that she had noticed since arriving, that the top of her hair always feels a little "oily" (which is odd) right after her shower, and said that she thinks "her hair must hate the Shanghai water". Which, the lady told her, was close to accurate :-) She said everyone has the same problem and that the hair will "become happy" in about 6 months (lucky lucky me!) and that we have to rinse alot longer here than we think we need to. Which may be true ... no issues with it when they washed the hair and they rinsed it for ... well ... forever it seemed. But both of the haircuts so far seem okay although Tom thinks that his may not be short enough. We'll head back there in 5 weeks or so, which we are thinking will be our "schedule" for our haircut plus Carrefour shopping trip. We'll plan to "stock up" on the non-perishables that we can get there (like cold cereal, mashed potatoes, couscous, and UHT milk) that we really can't get at the stores more local to us.

So ... when was the last time you saw one of these???

Well, for us, it was this past Sunday for lunch! Yep, Pepsi cans with the pull tabs are alive and well in Shanghai.

Tonight's dinner was at a Korean restaurant, where in the middle of the table is a burner and you cook your food on it yourself. You order however many things off the menu (different meats although mostly beef) as well as mushrooms and/or potatoes. They bring them all out to you raw and you lay them on the burner and cook them yourself. Then (we learned this by carefully watching the other diners) you dip the cooked meat in the sauce and then in a spice mix (it was like a mix of paprika and cumin it tasted like), put the meat on a lettuce leaf, wrap it up, and voila ... a little meat sandwich that you eat. They also have some noodles and rice bowls that come pre-cooked to your table.

This was a couple weeks back, but when I went to Beijing on business, I took the Maglev, which stands for Magnetic Levitation". The Shanghai Maglev train was the first commercial high-speed maglev line in the world, which opened to public service January 2004. They have a display which shows the speed throughout the trip.

It shuttles passengers from the Pudong International Airport to one of the metro stops on line 2, where then you can transfer to get to other places in Shanghai. The top operational commercial speed of this train is 431 km/h (268 mph), making it the world's fastest train in regular commercial services since its opening in 2004. At full speed, the journey takes 7 minutes and 20 seconds to complete the distance of 30 km (18.6 mi), although some trains in the early morning and late afternoon take about 50 seconds longer. A train can reach 350 km/h (217 mph) in 2 minutes, with the maximum normal operation speed of 431 km/h (268 mph) reached thereafter.

Here is my top speed that day ... 301 km/hour.

Hopefully the weather will be nice tomorrow (Sunday) and we'll venture over to the Puxi side of town (the older city) and maybe go to a few historical places for next week's blog.