Shanghai, what awaits us?

The skyline of Hong Kong is already something special, but Shanghai is even more impressive. You constantly want to take pictures because you are so overwhelmed, but the images don't really capture the reality. But let's start from the beginning:

The immigration process is very time-consuming. It took us 1 1/2 hours from the ship until we were through with immigration. They also take fingerprints and measure your body temperature as you pass by, and they look at your passport photo three times to make sure it's really you. This is no different from the cumbersome and thorough process in America, and we have also spent 90 minutes in Dubai.

Anyway, we made it to our first excursion. The ship is located right next to the Bund waterfront promenade. This promenade is about 2.5 km long and truly extraordinary, but I'll come back to that later.

The first excursion was quite comprehensive and touched on the most important sights, just like the evening excursion 'Shanghai at Night' so that we could get an overview and then explore the most interesting points in more detail on our own in the remaining two days.

So we quickly visited the Pudong district (newer district) with banks, department stores, and the stock exchange, with the districts connected by various tunnels under the water.

The tour lasted only 4 hours but had the advantage that the tour guide spoke excellent German and was very friendly. We negotiated with him and booked him for a private tour today, Tuesday. He will pick us up at the hotel later and show us various things that interest us.

Therefore, we will report on the details of the city later.

We did not finish the evening tour because we just didn't want to queue up anymore, as we were completely exhausted.

The taxi drivers have the same problem as in Taipei, they don't understand you and they even cheat you. A great combination.

The regular taxis are fine, but the second group is bad. They turn on the meter during the ride and charge four times the fare.

He couldn't read the name of our destination, but he could read the phone number. So he called there and now he knew where we wanted to go. The whole thing then cost 60 Renminbi, which is about 10 euros, but it should have only cost half.

Since we teamed up with another couple, it only cost us half.

Back on the ship, around 10 p.m., the restaurants were still open until 11:30 p.m., and we had a nice meal and later sat in the Aida Bar with our new friends from the former Interflug, the Reuter family from Berlin, until almost 1 a.m., and everyone told their stories.

The next morning, all the guests left the ship, and most of them flew back to Germany. We moved on foot from the ship to our hotel (distance 500 m) right on the Bund. We will report on our first independent exploration in the next chapter.

As already mentioned, the pictures will follow later for technical reasons.