shanghai at The Observer's Log

Posts Tagged ‘shanghai’

My favourite trains (so far)

21 Nov 2009

I rarely remember my dreams. I have to wake up in the middle of them to remember what they were about, and quite often I’m so tired that by the time I can get my mental faculties together to try and remember the dream, I already forgot what it was. Which is probably good, since most of the dreams I remember make very little sense.

This morning’s dream was an exception. I was talking with someone I know (admittedly, can’t remember who it was) about trains. (Believe it or not, this is not an unknown conversation.) They asked me what my favourite train trips were, and I had said something like “whoa, that’s a tough one, let me think”. Then I started rhyming them off.

Oddly enough, that was about when I woke up … and I kept rhyming. So I figured, heck, that just sounds like a blog post!

(more…)

Things seen along the way

30 Jun 2005

As we”ve moved along over this journey, I”ve taken pictures of things for posting to the blog. Some of them didn”t make it, for one reason or another. But hating to waste good pictures, I thought I”d throw them into a blog posting for all to experience.

(more…)

The Shanghai Museum

4 Jun 2005

Lest I neglect a wonderful place in Shanghai. One of our first stops was the Shanghai Museum. This is a fairly new place, having only opened in the last couple of years. And its exhibitions are among some of the best I’ve ever seen. The building itself is quite nice to look at (as are many of the buildings in Shanghai), but the collections are even better.

(more…)

The Shanghai MagLev Train

4 Jun 2005

A few years back, someone got the idea that China really needed to showcase its technical know-how, and put forth the idea of building one of the most technically-complex things for commercial use: a MagLev train. Magnetic levitation, while not a new idea, is an expensive proposition. Few countries have even attempted it (the major attempts have been primarily Germany and Japan, with smaller ones in England, the United States, and France), and only China has created a commercial system. At a cost estimated at $1.2 billion (US, I presume). This is for a 30km link that runs from Pudong airport to Shanghai’s state-of-the-art subway line, but not even close to the downtown core.

(more…)

We’ve been Shanghai’d

4 Jun 2005

So we found out today at lunch that our hotel is on what was farmland barely a decade ago. The Pudong area of Shanghai was nothing but agriculture until China opened up a scant time ago, and BOOM — a city appeared. Most of it here is new and fresh. It’s modern on a scale that’s hard to imagine.