Note: This entry was created after our arrival back in Ottawa due in part to our limited time and more importantly to a poorer choice of Internet Café in our neighborhood. More is said in our last travel posting about our periodic encounter with technology.
With our return trip from Hangzhou completed, we started to think of our return back to Canada. Jenny has made arrangements for a family supper gathering at a local restaurant. We spent most of the day at Yuyuan Bazaar doing some more souvenir shopping. The place is much more enjoyable than the Saturday we came over during the National Holiday week. We even had lunch at the very famous “Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant” described by our travel guidebook as “You can spot this place by the queues of salivating Chinese outside, waiting impatiently for the city’s most famous xiaõlóngbaõ made by an assembly line of white-coated Chinese matrons”
As planned our Thursday evening supper was held with family members. The setting was relaxing – and watermelon was served!
A visit of Shanghai would not be complete, if Pudong, the most modern area of Shanghai, was not experienced. Hence Friday morning, after packing most of our travel stuff and souvenirs, we took the-always-busy bus at 11am for the train station where we embarked, for the first time in Shanghai, on the subway with the objective of visiting the largest park in the city – Century Park. Pudong is certainly modern, but appears to only consist of high-rise residential and business buildings. One can see the Jinmao Tower – the highest building in China which houses the highest hotel above ground level in the world (floors 54 to 87). At the Century Park, we rented a pedal-cart and strolled around the park for an hour or so. On our way back, we took the local ferry to cross the Huangpu River that separates Pudong from Shanghai’s downtown. We had a very good supper at a restaurant on Jinling Road. In the evening, we experienced the lively Nanjing Road neon lights and did a bit more souvenir shopping.
Jenny’s sister-in-law had previously booked a mini-van for our ride to the airport. Saturday morning, we had an early light lunch at a local restaurant and then loaded all our luggages onto the mini-van for the Pudong Airport (40+kms away). We managed to double our luggage as a result of our shopping and gifts from family members. All available family members boarded the mini-van with us. Check-in of the baggage was very slow at this modern airport. We could not explain why there were 4 staff members at each counter – but only three counters open for the hospitality class line-up.
The flights back to Vancouver and then to Ottawa were much easier on us than on the way to China.
We will miss:
– the absence of tax on everything
– no tipping anywhere
– the treats and candies
– the endless shared-plate meals
– the beautiful architecture of ancient buildings and gardens
– family members
– countryside views
We won’t miss:
– constant spitting
– smoking everywhere
– overcrowding in buses
– long line-ups everywhere
– multitude of high-rise buildings
– squatter public toilets
In a nutshell, we really enjoyed our time in China. Jenny reported that for the first time she felt like a real tourist in China. I had time to read almost two paperbacks – a sign of relaxing time. Jenny and Victoria enjoyed watching Chinese TV whenever they could. Victoria surprised us throughout the trip by her stamina for the frequent long walks. An important concern was our health and except for Jenny’s food poisoning in Funing, we did not encounter any other health issues or suffered any injuries. For Victoria, this trip sometime seemed like a quest for answers: “Why is the emperor dead?, Why are people buried? Where is my Chinese grandma? Why is the man on sidewalk asking for money? Why? Why?”
About our experience with the travelogue technology abroad.
===============================
Well, we were taken a bit by surprise by most of the Internet Cafés we encountered. We were far from encountering wi-fi HotSpots connections. If we only needed to post text, no problems but because we wanted to share some photos with everyone. The requirement for a PC with a USB port and a thumbnail-friendly operating system (XP, Windows2000) proved to be often difficult to locate as most Internet Cafés still operate under Win98 – 99.5% of users appear to be playing games only. The only truly ideal Internet Café was found in Beijing close to the University Campus. Navigating Windows under Chinese characters was not so easy – even for Jenny. We took a lot more pictures than we anticipated – almost 500 of which 80% we plan to keep – we shared 20% of those with you. We only carried two(2) 128Mb and one(1) 16Mb Compact Flash Cards. A good thing we had purchased a 256Mb USB Portable Hard Drive and a Compact Flash Card reader.
After selecting a subset of pictures we wished to share, we had to pre-process the JPEG files to shrink their size via a software utility in order to make their upload more efficient. Most Internet Cafés did not have any MS-Office products i.e. this partly explains the many typos and bad sentence structure (some other explanations include sticky keyboard, time pressure, etc).
Some possible solutions for next time…
– upgrade our hotel selection from 2-star to 5-star with business computing centers,
– purchase a sub-notebook (or PDA) to help with the text and photo processing up-front,
– budget more time at Internet Cafés
– have good software utilities to preview and shrink jpeg files – even under Win98.
NOTE: This travelogue will only be available until mid-November.