TFI SHANGHAI’D IN SHANGHAI TOUR 2015

I was in Shanghai last week. I hadn’t been there since 2006, and I hadn’t been to mainland China at all since 2010, so it took some readjustment on my part.

I didn’t see much of Shanghai this time, though I did have a decent view of Century Park.



Otherwise, most of my time was spent either in the hotel, the convention center or the metro between the two of them. But I do have some bullet points to pass along:

1. None of my flights were on time. This is normal for Shanghai and not unexpected.

2. The Shanghai taxi I took to my hotel had no A/C so we drove on the expressway with all the windows down. Which was invigorating.

3. I got mild food poisoning from room service beef.

4. I bought a prepaid SIM card with a 1GB data plan – which was about 980MB more than I needed since most of the apps I use (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and Flipboard) are illegal in China. I can verify that WhatsApp, Google Maps, and Yahoo Mail work fine.

5. Century Park is pretty festive at night, judging from the traditional Chinese music blaring from the pavilion across the street from my hotel. Luckily, they shut it down by 9pm.

6. The Shanghai Metro didn’t exist last time I was in town. It’s actually pretty good once you figure out the ticketing machine, and as long as you do a little prelim research on which lines you’ll need and which stops you plan to use.

7. I got unsuccessfully hustled twice – once from a guy pretending to have lost his money under complicated circumstances, and once from another guy who wanted to sell me his iPhone.

8. When I went back to the airport, the road leading to the departure hall in Terminal 2 was blocked off for no apparent reason. So the taxi driver dropped me off in the short-term parking area.

9. I saw my first 3D food printer.





I didn’t try one, no.

10. This song was running through my head for most of the trip.

"Nazareth - Shanghai'd In Shanghai" (Watch on YouTube)

11. Thanks to this trip, I now have a ten-year visa for China. That’s because US passport holders can now only apply for ten-year visas (as opposed to single entry, double entry, multiple entry for six months, one year, etc). No idea why.

Anyway, you may be seeing future posts about me being in China, is what I’m saying.

Over the borderline,

This is dF