my first day in China

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17November 2009 I landed in Shanghai Pudong International airport, my Indian friends studying in Jiangsu received me and gave me two choices, go to the city either by Maglev or airport bus. I chose Maglev as I have never travelled in anything that’s faster than 140km/hour. Maglev station was in the airport complex with a sign board showing “33km in 8mins”, we bought the tickets 80RMB per person for single journey( airport bus was just 22RMB) and entered the train which was guarded by two tall Chinese officers. It was not quite a journey as the train reached the destination in just 8mins with a top speed of 484km/hr passing through the suburbs of shanghai filled with flyovers and broad roads. Longyang station was the final point for the maglev from where we had to take the shanghai metro (line 2) to reach the centre of the city. We got out in people’s square (really filled with people) which was way too crowded as we had to brush through people just like in my country. We got out of the station through one of the exits and for the first time I felt cold wind hissing by my oily face( haven’t been to any cold place before in my life) I watched the Victorian style buildings with colourful lights and roads with buses powered by electricity. It was the end of autumn and the beginning of winter; the roads were filled with dry leaves, empty trees and Chinese people dressed up with stuffed jackets. I could find McDonald’s and KFC’s everywhere but my eyes were looking for something Chinese and there was nothing Chinese except for the people, so we settled for a Latte in Starbuck’s . We just spent half an hour there as we had to leave shanghai and go to Zhenjiang , Jiangsu province in an hour. We took the metro again to shanghai Railway station where we boarded the fast train (dong che) to Zhenjiang (In the later years “dong che” became “gao tie” which was more faster). The train reached Zhenjiang in 80mins and we got out of the train in an open platform where the weather was colder than in shanghai. Zhenjiang was a small city and not very well developed as that of others cities in Jiangsu (but well developed for my eyes) had a small railway station compared to that of the massive station in shanghai, as we came out of the station there were a lot of taxi drivers shouting out something in Chinese and few of them calling out “hello! How are you? Taxi?” (The only English phrase spoken by Chinese taxi drivers), we kept moving not listening to them and walked to the city bus stop nearby. The bus was very interesting as we just had to drop one yuan in the coin box and can get down in any bus stop in the city. We reached the school in half an hour and they showed me my apartment and went to bed just like that.

Since that was my first day in china, I wrote about everything I observed, later in the next blogs I will make it simple with only useful details about the places I visited. China was my dream place and I enjoyed everything that’s Chinese in those three years. If anybody travels to china I can give you the best travel tip.

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