SH: Safe and sound!

The flight was long but manageable.  And surpringly, I was somewhat impressed with Air Canada.  The flight attendants were very nice (except for one I call sassy pants, but it was all in good fun), and the food was ok!  I ordered a special meal due dairy and I not getting along well, and it was sort of ok!  We only had a wee bit of turbulence - me likes.

On the plane - Watched some movies, slept a bit (like...2.5hrs?), played some scrabble slam with Matthew...whined about how long 14+ hours really is...

Shanghai airport is SUPER nice and new and shiny.  Nicer than Toronto airport.  And all the signs had Chinese/English - which is good, since I'm on my own on Sunday to fly to HK.  Is that considered a domestic or Internation flight I wonder? [Update:  Wallace says it's International]

YangBo (our coworker) met us at the airport, and we took the MAGLEV train into town!  Cool!  We cruised along for 7 minutes at like 300 km/h.  Apparently that trip takes 1 hour on the subway.  Wow.  Almost too fast for me!  And I think it goes up to 400 km/h!

Weird thing - as we were driving from the train station to the hotel in YangBo's car, we passed two sets of random overhead cameras.  Like the ones as you get on the 407 - but we weren't getting on a toll road, we were just driving down a street.  We asked YangBo, he said they were just for security.  Big Brother is watching...

Any time we violated what would clearly be traffic rules in North America (and are probably rules here, but I'm not sure how much people care), Matthew (my coworker who is here with me from Markham) was amused.  We almost ran over people in a scooter at least twice, no one seemed to mind.  And the scooters - it was dark out when we were driving.  Did any of them have their headlights on?  No.  And no helmets!  Hahahha.  Makes me nervous for them!  The lines on the street are just suggestions.

Lots of Western chain restaurants are around - BK, Pizza Hut, and right around the corner there is a little plaza of restaurants, with Subway, Starbucks, Coldstone (Hah!  Coldstone is barely in Canada, to me Coldstone is California!), McD's...hahah.   No thank you.  But interesting still. (/sad?)

The hotel is pretty nice, but maybe getting a tinge of shabby.  My room is like 5 miles from the elevator!  It is quite nice though, no complaints.  The bed served me well last night - slept ok until about 4am, then I was awake, but didn't get up until 5am.  I did yoga, went to the gym, and now I'm all showered and relaxed!  I checked out the change room while I was at the gym - hot tub, cold tub, steam room and sauna!  Hot!  I will try to avail myself of these things later tonight, maybe. [Update:  I had a massage.  Nice!]

Word on the street is shopping is cheaper in HK than Shanghai, so I will try to hold back.  :)  Another thing that stunned me - I realized that I paid like $0.17 for a 550mL bottle of water last night.  To me this is excellent evidence the chinese currancy is being artificially held too low.  Interesting.  17 cents!

Sorry, couldn't get Internet at the hotel the first night!  And speaking of which - CHINA blocks blogger AND facebook!  How's a girl to get out her travel thoughts to the masses??!  I had to go to extreme lengths to get this published (Thanks to JCS for all her help!)