The Fast and Tall sides of Shanghai

After what turned out to be a delightful "long cut" on the way to the metro (see previous post called walking to the metro if you missed it earlier), we finally arrived. There was a bit of confusion about how to get down to the actual subway level with our trusty stroller, but a very friendly policeman granted us access to the handicapped elevator. (Turns out that by sending us that way, we bypassed getting tickets, but we wouldn't learn that until we were at our destination and tried to get out. Thankfully we were pretty convincing at playing "stupid tourists" and they let us out without punishing us for skipping the fee, which for Ian and I total would have been $1.20). Anyway, the subway system was immaculate! Reminded me much of the nicer ones I've seen in the world, ranked right up there in cleanliness and ease of use with the system in Barcelona and the system in Guangzhou.

My kids thought the metro was great and I think would have been happy to say that they had seen Shanghai by spending all day riding around. There were plenty of seats to sit in, but they wanted to "subway surf." Wonder where they got that from...

Along the way we saw plenty of places to eat. This was my favorite.
 
 

I think I liked it because of its simple, yet direct name. No guessing about what you may find inside. We didn't eat at one, but each one we passed was quite crowded.

Our first "official stop" of the touring day was to ride the mag-lev train. If our luggage situation had been different we would have taken the train from the airport into the city on Wednesday afternoon. But we had a lot to manage and decided to avoid as much stress as possible. So we rode the train purely as tourists out to the airport and back. The one drawback is that we ended up being there during the lunch hour imposed "slow time" and so we only got to experience the train at 301 kilometers per hour (187 mph) instead of its top speed of 430 kilometers per hour (267 mph). Still it was rather impressive and when we passed the train headed the other way it was startling how our train "bounced away" from it.
 

It is difficult to make the call on who enjoyed it the most, my little ones, or my "big kid" (known to the rest of the world as Ian).

After spending a lot of time in the stroller, we decided to take another break and let the kids stretch their legs in a courtyard. I just love watching them play together.
 

They kept playing tag, switching who was it over and over. Their delighted shrieks of joy brought smiles to many faces ~ even if we continued to get lots of stares. Makes me wonder what locals will think of our family after Saturday when we have three kids!

One thing that is both interesting ~ and perhaps lucky for us ~ here is that there are very few "safety rules" that we see in the states. Take for instance the "No strollers on escalators" that we see.
 

Thankfully this rule doesn't appear on escalators in China. Cause as we were about halfway down, a police officer was coming up the one right next to us.

Next we moved on to the tall side of Shanghai. The skyscraper that looks sorta like a bottle opener is the Shanghai World Financial Center.

 

According to the sign pictured, it holds (or at least did at one time) the record for the world's highest observation deck.

We ended up only paying to go to the 97th floor which is just below the lower part of the "cutout." The view from there was impressive enough!

The nearby pearl tower ~ Kylie's favorite building we saw due to the color ~ looked pretty tall from the ground,

but from our vantage point on the 97th floor it wasn't so big after all. And yes, if you must know, it was freaking me out a bit that my children kept sitting with their backs against the glass...

This part of the view was curious to me. Sorta made me wonder if the folks that lived in the red roofed buildings felt superior to the blue roofed building folks, or the other way around. You know, like The Sneetches.

After enjoying the view on the 97th floor, we were ushered down to the 94th floor where, most conveniently, there was a cafe and gift shop. We managed to avoid buying any overpriced souvenirs by dropping 1 yuan each for the kids to check out the view through a telescope.
 

And luckily their excitement about having seen through the telescope bought me enough "good will" from them to have them pose in front of the New Year sign. 

 

No, we weren't the only ones doing such. It took a long wait for us to get our kids up there without anyone else crowding into the picture. I did notice a few folks smiling and taking pictures of my kids while they were standing there together. Who can blame them, they are pretty darn cute!



Our time in Shanghai should take me two more posts, but I'm not sure that I'll get them done before the ever important post about Darcy! We just found out when we arrived in Hangzhou about an hour ago that we will meet her at 9:30 in the morning. (8:30 pm on Friday night EST)