430km/h without a helmet!

 25. April


 At our last breakfast on the hostel terrace,
I give in to the temptation to feed the resident vermin hunter and her three cute kittens.
I turn my back to our table for 30 seconds to get something from the buffet – and the cat family helps themselves to Jeannine's bacon, potatoes and hard-boileg egg. She insists they even sipped from her orange juice!

Jing'An ca 1920

Jing'An 2011

We lug our luggage to Jing'An subway to leave it at Kent and Hanrich's place for the day. Wayne takes us just around the corner into old Shanghai to buy some flowers and souvenirs. There is a whole lane with stalls selling fake antiques and Maorabilia and we have the opportunity for some hilarious haggling.
The animal market selling birds, crickets and water creatures, on the other hand, is not exactly my kettle of fish.

fish looking at us

Still, our next stop is the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium on Pudong. The aquarium comes with local mood music and has a lot of animals in comparatively small tanks. To add to my distress, I lose my red dragon hat. We take a quick walk on an elevated bridge to get a better sense of the skyscrapers and then return to Puxi, the West side of the Pu river.

We have just enough time for a tea tasting and buying expedition. The choice is huge and the teas are all so very tasty. Some more bags to squeeze into our suitcases :)

Ganbai!

 

Maglev max speed

A glass of bubbly back at the flat and then we are on our way to Pudong Airport. Instead of going all the way by subway, we change to the 8 minute 'flight' on the 'maglev', the magnetic-levitation train. The German construction accelerates to 430km/h and after a minute already has to put on the brakes in order not to overshoot the longhaul runways... After checking in, we spend our remaining yuan on – dumplings of course.

relaxed flight to the airport

HongKong airport is so busy that our flight cannot be scheduled for landing, so our take-off gets delayed by an hour. Fortunately we have plenty of Chinese newspapers (English editions) to keep us busy on the stationary plane. We wouldn't mind if we knew for certain that we will be missing the connecting flight to Frankfurt because it would give us an opportunity to explore HongKong courtesy of Cathay, but we are not that delayed. Instead we don't even get to see the airport because we have to race to the connecting flight gate.
We catch our flight and sit back to enjoy our last Asian meal and the ridiculously large selection of movies. Although they are not subtitled, I can't resist watching some HK kungfu flicks. The language sounds much harsher than Beijing Mandarin which sometimes has the softness of French or Italian. And then it's 'Zaijian' China.