Picasa is completely blocked from here, so I've moved to Smugmug. If you're interested in pictures of Qingdao, http://whereistanya.smugmug.com/China has pictures of Qingdao.
Shanghai (or at least tourist-Shanghai) is phenomenal. Elegant buildings, elegant streets and oh-so-elegant passers-by. Skyscrapers wrapped in clouds shining out in blue and silver lights. You stand on the Bund and look across the river at Pudong, lit up at night like a classier Times Square, and it's like Coruscant or something. You know in a scifi movie where the more advanced life forms live in a glorious white city of spires and walkways and flying cars? That's what it's like. (The superintelligent aliens probably wouldn't block Picasa.)
I took the Maglev yesterday. One minute it's an unassuming brownish plasticy looking train with a wedge nose -- not at all like a bullet train -- and then suddenly it's leaning deeply into a turn at 431kmph and... yeah. Not too shabby. It runs for just eight minutes out to the airport, so you barely have time to appreciate it, but it's at least as cool as I'd expected and that was a high bar. I love that it makes "seriously I'm working quite hard here" noises when it gets fast. It's somehow less impressive when trains glide silently.
China is twelve hours ahead of New York. It's the same o clock. All of China uses Beijing time, which is a bit mental. Crossing the border to Kazakhstan you have to subtract two hours.
I'll be in/near Shanghai for another two days, and then I'm off to Kunming, capital of the Yunnan province. Kunming really isn't on the way to where I'm going, but I was in the mood for a long train journey and Yunnan is 38 hours away. No part of China is as highly/frequently recommended as the Yunnan province, except maybe Shanghai.
All good until I looked at timetables and realised it'll take at least three, maybe four, days to get back out of there and up to Urumqi, near the Kazakh border. Whoops. Well, my kindle is well stocked at least :-) We'll see whether I'm still in the mood for long train journeys once I get there.
If you're going to Yunnan, there's a good two-day hike along the Yangtze in Tiger Leaping Gorge that's quite pretty. It's an hour or so drive from Lijiang (hostels in town can arrange minivans easily, as a fair number of people go for the hike). There are a number of small b&b / hostels in some villages midway through the hike that are happy to take whoever shows up for the night.
ReplyDeleteSSH to a box back home and you can beat the Great Firewall. I've a friend in China that uses my home firewall to access Facebook, Youtube and other blocked websites. On an Android phone all you need is the SSHTunnel app and from a Windows PC putty and FoxyProxy work very well. On a Unix box it's even easier, just ssh -D 4444 mybox.moon.moo then tell your applications to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:4444. It works really well on a Mac too as many applications will just use the system proxy settings. (But you probably know all this already!)
ReplyDeleteTry and walk around the French Quarter. It is my favorite part of Shanghai. Some excellent food and architecture there. Also, Shanghai (PuXi side of the river) has a couple of good bookstores with English books - in case you want to stock up.
ReplyDeleteOh, the irony of teaching Tee how to ssh....
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