We stopped for lunch in a very swanky building, complete with turnstyle security and priceless lumps of jade.
The whole place was complete devoid of atmosphere and the staff just couldn't be bothered - I should imagine it is similar to low grade tourists lunching in Canary Wharf where the waiters etc are used to flashy business types handing out large tips. On the bright side the crockery was quite nice, but I couldn't fit 6 place settings into my handbag.
And there was another sign to make me giggle - I wonder if the Chinese have trained their feet to steal to order.
From there we headed for the nearby Jin Mao Tower which is the middle one of these 3 (internet image taken from the other side of the Huangpo River).
It was China's tallest building until 2007 when it was surpassed by the nearby Shanghai World Financial Centre. It is 420.5m (1,380 ft) 88-story (93 if counting the floors in the spire) and contains a shopping mall, offices and a hotel. It also has an observation floor open to the public (for a large fee naturally) which hopefully won't bother Ian's sporadic vertigo too much.
The queue was quite long but moved quickly thanks to the number of people they managed to cram into the lift for each journey!
You really did leave your stomach behind travelling 88 floors in 9 seconds/
Those are the figures showing on here.
Of course it was heaving on the observation deck and there were numerous Chinese groups who didn't use the "whisper system" and so you had their tour guides shouting at the tops of their voices and any one getting separated from their group for more than 1 sec then had to push past to catch up. For the money charged I also feel that the windows should have been kept clean. Anyway, enough of the moans, here are a few random pictures.
Huangpo River
This is the now China's tallest building, which is the one on the right in the internet picture above.
I almost managed a panorama.
The Oriental Pearl TV Tower which also has an observation deck.
Looking down the central atrium all the way to the coffee shop at the bottom. Not an easy shot to take and I had several attempts before I was happy.
Having paid my money to go up I was determined to take as many photos as I wanted, so I dodged a few barriers that were trying to enforce a one way system and had another go round.
The area on the far side of the river is The Bund which we'll visit later.
Back on terra firma and just looking up makes you dizzy.
I've given up trying to avoid converging verticals.
Lucky timing for the ghost aeroplane.
We really are packing everything in today. Next up a trip on the Maglev Train (maglev = magnetic levitation) the world's first
commercial high-speed maglev.
I don't think much of Raymond's skills - he kindly took the photo on the right and it's completely out of focus!
The 30km journey from Longyang Road station, on the outskirts of central Pudong, to the Airport takes just 8 minutes and 10 seconds. The train has a maximum cruising speed of 300 km/h (186 mph) which is reached in 2 minutes and 15 seconds.
As you can see it's not exactly crowded.
The moment we reached maximum speed.
I took a couple of videos which quite frankly are just too boring to post so I've limited it to this short bit which films another train coming in the opposite direction. Because we are both travelling at 300 km/h (186 mph) it only takes a second or so for the 12 carriage train to pass.