After leaving the Canadian coast we thought we had left North America, but then Alaska came into view. Great circle routes certainly produce surprises to those simply accustomed to looking at regular flat maps. The terrain was flat and dotted with lakes and streams, and there were many islands. Here are a couple of pictures of the area.
Later we crossed over Japan and flew along its western coast for a while, and there were a few islands as we approached China. Other than that the rest of the flight was over water. In the northern areas we saw quite a few groups of dots on the surface that appeared to be moving around and diving or otherwise disappearing. Sea lions? Icebergs?
There were two more meals on the plane, each progressively more Asian than the previous. The last one included only chopsticks.
Finally we landed in Shanghai. The terminal was massive and very modern. We passed in our health forms at the first checkpoint, and then we joined the large mass of people at the immigration control. It was hot and humid and took us an hour to work our way up to the front, but once there we got straight through with no hassle. The authorities weren’t on the lookout for us! The long wait at immigration gave our baggage plenty of time to arrive, and we all went straight through the green line at customs with no problem.
The way out was lined with drivers holding up signs with the names of their clients, and it wasn’t long before I spotted a young woman with a sign saying Alberta University. She ushered us to the exit door, where we were met by a representative of Shanghai University. We loaded ourselves and our luggage into a large van and took off on a high speed toll road for the three-hour trip to Hangzhou. The driver knew how to handle the road and was very proficient in the use of his horn. Though it was rather smoggy and getting dark, we could see that the landscaping along the road was profuse, very nicely done, and well tended. There were flowers everywhere. (See next paragraph.)
We stopped for a break at a rest area along the way. We Westerners confined ourselves to the customary water, soft drinks, and ice cream snacks, but when our host got back to the van he was carrying bags of a Chinese snack for all of us. They were little pyramid-shaped things, maybe two inches on a side, hot and dripping with water, quite precisely constructed, and secured with string. Removing the string revealed that the outer wrapper was made of leaves rather like corn husks, quite amazingly folded into so regular a shape. Inside the leaves was a ball of rice, and inside the rice was a ball of fish or meat. They were tasty but quite messy to eat, necessitating a trip to the men’s room to wash hands. The amazing sight in the men’s room was a planting of large flowers behind a clear plastic panel that formed the back wall of the, errrrr, “facilities.”
Then back into the van and on to Hangzhou. It’s a very large city, and it was clear that our driver had never been there before. But with the benefit of a few stops to ask directions he succeeded in getting us to the hotel. We went past quite a bit of very active night life along the way and saw a massive fireworks display going on at the edge of town, but things got pretty quiet by the time we reached our hotel. Check-in had a few glitches but it all worked out. Hotel is brand new, built in conjunction with the World Leisure Expo (see next blog), which is the site of Dan’s conference. They went a bit overboard in designing the electrical systems in the rooms. Even an MIT degree in EE wasn’t enough to get it figured out for a day or so, and there are still some enigmatically labeled switches that we’re afraid to touch.
We were exhausted by the time we got settled in our rooms. And the next day (today), nobody reported having a really good night’s sleep. It takes a while to recover normalcy.
Today was devoted to exploring the very local area and taking long naps. I’ll start writing about it tomorrow.
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