Our Princess cruise ended today in Shanghai, China.
Among other things, we had arrived in the land of no Google. Our first impression of Shanghai was not great. First of all, there was such an incredible line for taxis at the cruise terminal that we waited well over an hour in a queue of hundreds if not a thousand people. Once in the taxi, our driver seemed to have a bad attitude, and for some reason, the directions the hotel--Topsun on the Bund--had provided me in Chinese were not adequate, and he got very frustrated about this. Eventually he phoned the hotel and got us there without difficulty, but his demeanor was very offputting. Then our experience with the hotel reception was even worse. The young man managed to combine incompetence with an atrocious attitude of indifference.
Anyway, once past that we actually had a really lovely afternoon. We walked down to the Huangpu River to get lunch and see the Shanghai skyline.
Later, we walked around our neighborhood where, interestingly enough, a lot of European Jewish refugees settled during World War II, before taking the subway down to the Bund to see the Astor House Hotel, and confirm our reservations there for the night of May 14. Here we had a different but also excellent view of Pudong (as well as the Russian Embassy).
From there we took the subway west to the Hongqiao Railway Station to pick up our train tickets for May 15, when we will be catching the train to Beijing. We ate dinner at the train station too.
Back at our hotel, we went for a final walk down to the water to see the city lights.
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