China, day 8 (July 6, 2006)
… last one! I'm done. The "Current Location" is the location the journal is about, not where I actually am (home). All of the pictures are up: Trip to China 2006 gallery (thanks to Jon for the gallery space).
We had soup for breakfast at a restaurant near the hotel. The soup was a whopping 5 yuan (about 60 cents) each. My father informs me that it was only so expensive because of its location.
We decided to go to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum before our flight. We were not very impressed by the museum, even though it had flash cards and giant floating CDs:
On the way out, we noticed they were stamping everyone that exited with some sort of invisible ink. They had done the same at the Shanghai Museum. I assume that it is visible in ultraviolet light or something, but I did not have an ultraviolet light on me at the time. My fault for being unprepared.
We got to and from the museum via the Shanghai Metro, which is pretty nice and very inexpensive. The prices are distance-based, so you can pay between 3 and 8 RMB for a ticket. I use the term ticket loosely because they use credit card-like cards with RFID, which you just put near a sensor pad and it lets you through.
For lunch, we ate at a restaurant in the Peace Hotel. It was good food, although not cheap.
After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to collect our bags and head over to the airport. We decided to go the tourist way and take the maglev to the airport. Currently, the maglev is positioned such that it does not make much sense to take it in terms of time or money, so the government is pushing it as a tourist attraction. The taxi driver actually tried to convince us to let him drive us all the way to the airport. My father had to call a friend on his cell phone to explain to the taxi driver that we really did want to go to the maglev.
The maglev was fun. The trip was about ten minutes. The first half was accelerating up to 430 km/h, which we stayed at for under a minute. Then we started decelerating.
In the airport, we had a long walk to the United ticketing counter. The area was huge, and United was in row V. We had some time before the flight took off, so we sat down in the lounge. There were ethernet ports with free internet access, so I got on for a few minutes.
The flight back was much better for me. I read a lot less and slept a lot more. We were in business class on a 777 with a 2-3-2 seating configuration. My father and I had two of the center three seats and the third was empty, so we got to spread out.
The flight left Shanghai Pudong International Airport at 18:00 on July 6, 2006 and arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago 13 hours later at 18:00 on July 6, 2006.
The end.