My train leaves for Beijing in just under three hours. Considering how busy Shanghai has been since Friday evening (when Golden Week started) I think Beijing is going to be a mad house. The train to Tianjin was sold out, so I will just be sticking with the capital, but it looks like there is way more there than I can fit in 4 days anyways.
Again, nothing much new in the past week, so today I have decided to shower you with some amazing/useless facts (it all depends on you!) about Shanghai. They do have Chinese food here (surprise!) but it is a bit different than back in Toronto. The stuff back home is Hong Kong and Guangdong style, which you can find here, but is by no means the norm. The local specialty in Shanghai is called Xiaolongbao, which is a type of steamed dumpling, different from what you get at a Dim Sum restaurant. You dip it in vinegar before eating (kinda like sushi and soy sauce) to counteract the oilyness. Shanghai has the world’s only commercialized magnetic levitation train. Its speed tops out at 431 km/h. It runs between the airport and Pudong new area. The metro here is relatively new, the first line having opened in 1994. There are currently three lines in the main part of the city and one more out in the boonies. There are at least 9 more lines currently planned, and I believe 5 of them are currently under construction. Check out a map here, lines 1,2,3 and 5 are currently open. Pretty crazy that they will have built all this in a span of 20 years. And they do it without a lot of the fancy tools we use back home, they rely on the good old-fashioned muscle power of exploited peoples (actually that is kind of like our railroads….). It is also hard to get information about this kind of stuff. Coming here makes me realize how much information we take for granted back home. The government goes to great lengths to be open to people and let them know what is going on. Here the public has no idea what is going on. They raised metro fares here two weeks ago and only gave 1 week’s notice. With the new metro lines, no one knows where they are in construction or when it will open. Probably just one day there will suddenly be a brand new metro line in operation. It really gives a feel that the public is not included in decision making, which is why it seems people don’t really talk politics here.
Lastly, it’s nearly three months after the fact, but I finally sorted out the technical difficulties that was preventing me from posting movies to the site. So there are now two movie clips in the Cambodia gallery. And due to popular (i.e. Damien’s) request, I am going to try and take some video clips to give you guys a better idea of what it is like here. If there is anything you are curious about or want to see just post a comment or send me a msg, I’ll try to hook you up.