With much anticipation, our first stop in China was finally here. Overnight we had sailed up the Yangtze River and docked right in theheart of Shanghai which on all initial views from the ship appears to be a thoroughly modern city with spectacular and varied architecture.
We heard horror stories of the immigration process and expected the worst. We had an Independent Excursion 1 designation which seemed to mean that HAL excursions would be permitted off before us and there were over 600 of them. Our group gathered in the Ocean Bar and waited for the PA announcement. It finally came about 8:50am and we proceeded off the ship. As this was our first disembarkation, I was pleased to note that when our granddaughter's card was scanned, the alarms went off and I had to vouch for her. That was good to learn. After a short walk into the terminal, we queued up in about 10 lines of 10-12 people each. We all had our passports examined and a copy of our passports stamped. We had then to surrender our passports to ship personnel and carry the stamped copy for all of our shore journeys.
We easily found our tour guide and the 25 of us boarded the bus with Autumn, our guide. We headed for the ancient water village of Zhujiajiao located about 1.5 hours drive away from the port. At the water village we headed for the gondola boats and enjoyed a nice gondola ride down one of the many canals. It was just like a similar ride in Italy.
We strolled down the very narrow villager sort streets and toured the ancient (and I do mean ancient) Post Office before doing more wandering before enjoying a really tasty meal at the Honglou (red tower) restaurant. Once we were back on the bus, we headed back into town and went to the Oriental Pearl TV tower which is the tallest in Asia. It's very architecturally scenic with all sorts of round or spherical shapes composing its structure. As our tour concluded our guide noted that we were short one couple. She looked for them for at least 15-20 months bites before giving up and heading back to the ship.
A group of young Chinese Acrobats were the entertainment and we all were tucked in by 10:30pm. A city tour is planned for tomorrow. Stay tuned.
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