Shanghai (上海市)

Finally, we get to see some of these people we were promised. And after 30km of walking, we got to see a few nice sights too. I get the feeling that today, we won't have to go searching for blog compatible pictures, today they line up for us.

For starters, the sky scrapers are hilarious, they all have some funny decoration, some wavy lines or an extra glass box glued to one of the faces. And for quite a few of them, I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually spaceships, hidden similarly to those in Men In Black.

And, we didn't really dare to go into this one but, there's a region which looks like it wants to be chinatown, and it's covered in tourists. Maybe all tourists know that all great cities must have a chinatown, and it doesn't really play a role whether they're actually in China or not.

China also uses an incredible amount of electric vehicles. The vast majority of scooters are all electric, which we already saw in Weihai. But here, they also have electric buses which follow over head wires, and (this one really surprised me) super capacitor buses. The capacitor buses only have power rails at the bus stops, and therefore only have a short amount of time to accumulate the power to get to the next stop, but it seems to be working quite well.

And China finally found the light switch for us. The view over the Huangpu River is filled with the pimp lights of the passing boats and the sky scrapers which made one of the sides into a giant TV. It's still somewhat surprising though that it all gets turned off pretty quickly again at 22:00. Maybe there's something we should know about ... like werewolves ...

But the Chinese are certainly not shy of noise. For the fact that they have a fairly strong hierarchical system, for example between the students and the teachers, most people just seem to spend a lot of time shouting at each other, like in the lobby of a hotel. Cars are a bit too big to get moving by just shouting so they use the horn instead.