China - Day 1

This is the start of a series of posts on the eclipse trip we took to China. We arrived there on July 14th and left on the 27th. There were so many interesting things to see and do there that one or two posts would even come close to describing the trip. So, I'm going to do the posts day by day.

Tuesday, July 14
Early in the morning of July 13th we got on a plane from Chicago to Toronto, Canada. We met several other people from the tour group at the Toronto airport, 4 from London, Ontario, and 2 from Boston, Mass. Then we settled in for a very, very long flight to Shanghai. We arrived the afternoon of the 14th. (China time is exactly 12 hours ahead of EDT during the summer and 8 hours ahead of UDT all year round. All of China is officially in the same time zone.) The captain said that we would fly within 300 miles of the North Pole before flying over parts of Russia and China before eventually landing in Shanghai.

We oohed and aahed over the highway and building construction we saw on the way from the airport to the hotel. The landscaping around the highways was fantastic. There were well-tended shrubs, flowers, and trees on the sides of the road and in the median. The first picture shows some construction for the World Expo to take place next year in Shanghai.

The next picture is one after we got off the divided highway and onto city streets (which were quite wide also). A street this empty was the exception.

Finally, here is a view from our hotel room. Usually, the roadway in the picture was packed with cars. To the right is an IKEA. To the left and not visible in the picture is one of the venues used for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

By the way, we checked the hotel elevators for which floors would and would not be there. Every hotel we stayed in (with possibly one exception) had both a 4th and a 13th floor. (4 is considered an unlucky number in China since the Chinese word for 4 sounds a lot like the one for death. 13 is, of course, often considered unlucky in Western cultures.) We stayed at the Huating Hotel and Towers.