Friday, December 26, 2008

The upper reaches of the sea

Hello world!

It has been long time since I blogged... These days royal Sujit is really leaving royally in Hostel Complex of IISc. So, he is not getting time to blog... :D

Hey actually its not that life is really busy. But the thing is I don't have any specific topic to bore you with. However, I have something to share with you folks... (Its most likely that I have already told you about this... :) ) I traveled to Shanghai recently. I thought lets take this opportunity to blog...

So, today I am going to tell you a tale of my travel to China.

It so happened that one fine day GOD smiled and thought let Royal Sujit have some more royal life... and he made a small peg of WINE (ha ha ha...click on the word to know what it exactly means) for me. In short, star of riches was shining on me when my (research ???) paper got accepted in this workshop.

You see GOD just didn't stop there. He made my prof to ask me to travel to the city on the sea. ( Shanghai literally means: on the sea, the upper reaches of the sea, that is the title of this blog.. otherwise no relation between content and title... :) )

Shall I tell you one thing, when GOD is with you anything can happen. The conference people were not willing to give me original invitation letter. And here VISA consultant was asking for it. Finally I submitted documents without original invitation letter and without accommodation details... and my VISA got stamped...

So now no problem for travel. Lot of friends helped me in packing, preparing for the travel and off course for the main purpose of travel, presentation.

The flight took off @ 300am 16 DEC 2008. After one more experience of take off, (If you have not read my description of take off, you may read my blog Unprecedented). I slept. Somehow I woke up around 500am. Just opened the window and realized that sun is rising...it was amazing view..and was lucky to wake up at that moment.

I landed in Hong Kong... spent 3 hours on the air port.. So got to know this airport much better.. I reached Shanghai @ 420pm (local time, IST+2Hrs30mins). When came out of air port, realized that its really very cold outside, as stated on various web sites. Took taxi and reached the hotel. In the night, just roamed nearby hotel to find out that day here ends little early...

Reached in time to conference venue on 17 DEC...

Conference got inaugurated well...after lot of good talks, it was lunch time... was interacting with many people... It was fun to talk with people coming over there from various parts of the world... I had little trouble in understanding their accent and they too in understanding my poor and fast spoken English... however we overcame it soon...

After couple of tutorial talks by some of the top researchers, the day ended with grand dinner. ( FYI: I had to survive during day on fruits only.. all the food served was non-veg.. :( people were somewhat skeptical how one can be such stubborn... I guess, they should visit India to realize that still considerable fraction of people here eat only veg food.... I had carried MTR ready to eat packets...so food was not a big problem )

Now set for my presentation, which was on 18th December... I was constantly wondering whether I would be able to finish my talk in 13mins... (that was the time alloted to me). And I did it.... finished few seconds early...

On eve of 18th DEC, conf people organized a trip to 'Yanshan Deep Water Port'...This is harbor constructed (also phase 2 still going on, and the tour guide told us, this will be the biggest harbor in the world after phase two, expected to be finished in 2012) 32.5 km inside sea... This has enabled a lot of trade...there is a long bridge to this deep water port... I had seen a nice sunset while traveling to the port...


This day banquet was arranged near a river side...Huangpu river....it is a big river in Shanghai... so east part is refereed as Pudong (dong in Chinese is east, Pu is taken from river name) and west is Puxi (xi - west)

The night time in Shanghai is really amazing... the lightning... the buildings.... the bund area near Huangpu river is astounding in the night time... roaming on pedestrian roads in night time is surely a wonderful experience...


I have not explored any of food items.... So can't comment on that...

On 20th we visited few museums in Shanghai.... with one museum is planning urban museum... which shows how they planned and developed Shanghai in 20 yrs...

We may find that this, the city above sea, is not as clean as US cities... there are some slum areas... but it is constantly improving... and shown to the world that they can progress fast in short span of time... they have targets for developments... and achieving them...

In India many times we say we want to make Mumbai as Shanghai...I think we can make change happen....but we have to work much harder....

On my last day in the city, I traveled back to airport in Maglev...this is magnetic train, covers distance of 30 km in just over 7 mins...with maximum speed of 431 kmph... Traveling through Maglev was simply superb....


So I returned early morning on 21st December with loads of memories from China....

(Click on the photos for full resolution,
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