Shanghai [Part 3]

Thanks to jet lag, I woke up well before the sun rose.  As the sky brightened, I noticed what looked like mountains in the distance.  But I knew the area is flat, so all I was seeing was skyscrapers in the smog, all the way to the horizon.

My breakfast view over the river was pretty great.

I met a couple folks, including one who worked about two blocks from my office in Mountain View.  :)  Breakfast was a fusion of Chinese food, Japanese food, and western-style continental breakfast.


I spent the morning doing some sightseeing.  I knew I wanted to go into the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (that giant bulbous thing) but I wasn't quite sure how to pay for it, so I first just wandered around the area.

Found a McDonalds, of course:

Then I went into one of the largest malls I've ever been in, the Super Brand Mall.  It had 13 floors and SO MANY STORES.  It felt bigger than the Mall of America, but Wikipedia says the Mall of America has more floor area.

That's the entrance (note: I was already two stories off the ground when I took this picture...  and it has two basement floors too).  I tried to capture the scale of just one part of the interior, but my camera angle isn't wide enough.  :)

The I headed over to the Oriental Pearl Tower and saw some kind of multicultural dance and song event.  Musicians from different countries would get on stage and perform in the heat, all day long.

The tower has four parts: the museum at ground level, the lowest observation deck is the big ball, the main observation deck is the higher ball, and the much smaller highest ball is the "space capsule".  I paid extra for access to all four.

This is the elevator that takes you up to the observation deck.

The observation deck was pretty awesome.  It was a sunny day.  My hotel is lower right and the Bund is across the river:

This is the Super Brand Mall from above:

And here is a view the other direction, down Century Ave:

On the right, you can see the Shanghai Tower being built.  It is the second-tallest building in the world and will briefly be the tallest building in China.

Then I went up to the "space capsule", which I thought would be an extra-high observation deck.  I wasn't wrong, but mostly it was a cheesy "simulation" of being shot into space.  The elevator had a screen on the ceiling that made it seem like you were flying through the stratosphere, even though you were only going up another 80m or so.  Then they had a cheesy show and a fake astronaut hanging from the ceiling.

Finally I went back down to the glass-bottom observation deck.  It really made my hands sweat.  It didn't help that it was open to the wind.

The lower ball had a huge arcade:

And a roller coaster:

At this point I had to SQUEEZE into piles of people to get back to the elevators.  These old ladies kept elbowing me out of the way and getting in front.  People in China were so pushy that I was moving much more slowly than them.  Anyway, after about seven or so elevator loads, we got up to the front, where the security guards saw the old ladies being pushy and MANHANDLED them back into line.  It was awesome.

Next time I'll talk about the Shanghai History Museum, which was great.

Shanghai [Part 2]

After arriving at my hotel and tipping the driver, I was exhausted.  But it was only 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., so I figured I should stay up a little bit longer.  The evening heat was actually a little welcome after the freezing, unadjustable AC on the plane.

The air was fairly smoggy when I arrived.

Approaching the downtown Pudong area, I started to see the REALLY tall buildings.

My hotel room looked out over a garden and nearby skyscrapers.

Even though the first day of the conference was over when I arrived, and the lights were getting turned off, I had to take a photo of my name on the board.  :)

The hotel was gorgeous.  I was on the 5th floor and the conference was right down the hallway.  The hotel and the conference center shared the same building.  There were even three weddings in the hotel that weekend.

My room was pretty fancy too, with one of those giant windows between the bathroom and bedroom area.

Before crashing that night, I went for an evening stroll around the riverside area.  There were a bunch of restaurants, but none of them were Chinese.  They had Italian, American Bistros, Mexican...  but I can get that at home.  :)

Finally, I went to bed (even though the downstairs neighbor was blasting dubstep and the bass was reverberating in my bed).

The next day, I would do some sightseeing and attend some conference sessions.  I'll write about that later.

Shanghai [Part 1: The Trip West]

A couple months ago I received an email from a GDC China organizer inviting me to speak in Shanghai this year.  They'd pay for my flight and hotel room.  I said sure, I'm interested.  Actually, I was not that excited about traveling alone to the other side of the world, leaving Laura to deal with the kids.  However, when else would I get to travel to Shanghai?  I figured this would be a great experience and worth it in the end.

Things kept moving forward and thus I found myself with a business visa to the People's Republic of China, a direct flight from San Francisco to Shanghai (12.5 hours there, 11.5 back), and three nights at the beautiful Shanghai Oriental Riverside Hotel.

I was so busy with work and other things that I didn't really have much time to prepare.  Laura helped me get some currency and I received advice on visiting China from about a half dozen coworkers and friends.

The twelve hour flight there was quite comfortable: I had three meals, tons of legroom (in coach even!), a better-than-Virgin in-flight entertainment system, and two empty seats next to me.  Sure, I was tired after arrival, but the flight was quite comfortable.

You can see we flew up to Alaska and then across Tokyo and South Korea.

We had so much food on the plane.  I'm using to domestic flights where you are lucky to get a small snack.

Lunch: pork and rice, snow peas, carrots, broccoli, bread, grapes, melon, and some kind of sliced cabbage or seaweed or something.

Dinner: Turkey and swiss sandwich with lettuce on wheat bread.  I guess this was supposed to be a snack, because right after I'd finished the second half, they came around with breakfast:

Breakfast: two sausage links, omelette, roasted tomato, broccoli, tater tots, croissant, orange juice, cheesecake, cantaloupe, grapes.

I was so full I couldn't finish.  Somehow the old guy next to me ate all of his food though...

Oh, AND we got peanuts plus the standard selection of beverages.

I had been warned so many times to avoid sketchy taxis that I signed up for the official airport taxi to get to my hotel.  Well...  in the end it turned out I "rented a car" and "hired a driver" which cost me about $100 when I could have taken the subway for less than $5.  Oops.  Lesson learned.  Anyway, as they helped me find an official taxi, no less than seven people helped me.  One person even just carried my small bag up a single stairway just to hand it to someone else.  China had an amazing number of workers.  Most of them were just standing around as far as I can tell.  :)

I don't entirely regret taking a car to the hotel.  I got to see what the suburbs of Shanghai look like -- specifically, the Pudong area between the river and the ocean.

Perhaps the craziest thing was the sheer density of residential highrises.

Imagine buildings like this stretching to the horizon.  Each one was rusty and had some really sketchy engineering violations, like allowing rainwater to flow along electrical cables right into the structure, but the sheer number of structures and people was insane.

There was SO MUCH CONSTRUCTION.  I arrived on Sunday evening and even still there were construction workers constantly building.  Also it was crazy how many police officers were just standing around in the road.  I'm not sure what they were even looking for.

After getting stuck in a few Shanghai traffic jams, we made it to my hotel.  Next time I'll share my impressions of downtown Pudong.