The three wonders of Shanghai

Traditionally the wonders of the world have been amazing engineering feats. In the same spirit, let me list three engineering marvels of Shanghai.

Partway up the Shanghai World Financial Center

Pudong is definitely the first of the wonders of Shanghai. This new business district was created east of the river Huang Pu in the 1990s. Today it has two of the world’s 10 highest skyscrapers: the 632 meters high Shanghai Tower (second only to Burj Khalifa) and the Shanghai World Financial Center, which is 492 meters tal, and the 4th highest in the world). It has four buildings over 400 meters tall: the Oriental Pearl Tower and the Jin Mao Tower, in addition to these two. It also has a staggering 15 buildings which are 250 meters or more in height.

The plush interior of the maglev

The maglev train is the second wonder of Shanghai. It runs between Pudong international airport and the Longyang road station. The distance of about 30 kilometers is covered in about 7 minutes, and the peak speed is 431 km/second (a slower version has a peak speed of 301 km/s). This is the only commercial train of its kind in the world.

A pacing ad in the Shanghai subway

The third wonder of Shanghai are pacing ads next to the metro trains. As a train speeds between stations, there are video ads which pace alongside. This amazing synchronization needs screens covering large areas of tunnels, and software to keep the image synchronized with the windows of passing trains. This amazing invention has hardly received any notice in the media.

There is a fourth wonder, which is not really an engineering marvel. It is a management solution to garbage disposal. Shanghai is a city of 23 million people, and its roads are cleaner by far than the roads of Paris or Mumbai. This is surely a wonder.

Arriving in Shanghai

We left Mumbai precisely at 1:30 in the morning, local time. I fell asleep immediately and woke up groggy in 6 hours, just before our plane landed in Chengdu. The ticket gave us a single flight number, but China Airlines made us go through immigration and made us wait a couple of hours till we got on to a domestic flight to Shanghai. Strangely, in Pudong airport we were herded together into the international terminal again, where we collected our bags and went through customs. It was 1:30 in the afternoon, local time.

Shanghai Pudong airport is a busy international airport with a maze of corridors. As soon as we got out of the customs, we started looking for an ATM. There was a bunch of four right outside the exit. One of them was occupied by a young harassed-looking tourist whose card had been eaten up by the machine. We tried the next machine, and it would only allow transfer of funds to another card. The same thing happened with another machine in the row. The Family went to look for information on other ATMs while I stood there with the luggage cart. As I watched, another Indian went to the fourth machine, the one which we had not tried yet, and extracted cash from it! The Family was back looking dejected by now, but she perked up at this sight. We finally got our cash, and were set to venture into town.

The maglev has a rather plush interior

How? A bus to the hotel was quickly ruled out. We could take the metro all the way from the airport to the hotel, but that could take almost two hours. So we decided to take the maglev (cost 50 RMB) and then switch to the metro. For only 5 RMB more, you can add on a ticket which gives you a 24 hour pass on the metro. This is a good deal, because it takes 3 RMB for a single journey on the metro. We rushed on to the train. The maglev accelerated smoothly to its top speed of 300 kms/hour, and in 7 minutes took us to the other end of its journey. We took an escalator down to the metro station.

In the Shanghai metro you have to put your bags through a scanner when you enter. We’d just done that, when a very helpful local told me in English, ” If your bags are heavy, come with me. There’s an elevator to the platform”. How nice and helpful! We walked across the station to the elevator, where he murmured a complaint about bad design. He was going the same way, so he helped us on and told us to listen for the announcements, which come in both Chinese and English.

All through our stay in Shanghai we kept meeting people who would realize that we needed help, and come forward to help us without being asked. Not too many people spoke English, but those who did (and many who didn’t) were very helpful. What a delightfully friendly city we had discovered!