Europe trip part 43

Wednesday 30 October

 Today we are leaving Paris and flying home. Once we left the apartment, we lugged our heavy bags to the train station which was ten minutes away. We got off at Charles de Gaulle airport and once we checked in, we went to the Air France lounge for some breakfast. At 12:25pm we taxied along the runway and took flight for Shanghai which was exciting.

 Some 12 hours later, after a few hours sleep in my lie flat bed, we landed at Pudong airport – it was 7:00am local time.

 Thursday 31 October / Friday 1 November

 Dad’s brother David has moved back to Shanghai so we were able to have a 17 hour stop over that allowed us to have a look around this city before heading home to NZ. We landed around 7am and after faffing about getting our 24 hour visa we met David and headed into the city centre for a much needed cup of tea for mum.

 He very kindly organised a car and tour guide for the day so that meant we could cover a lot of ground – we drove around most the central part of the city which was really nice. It was really clean and the floral displays were stunning.

 They had 100’s of the most perfect flower arrangements running along the centre line of some of the main roads and they were mirror images of each other which was impressive! We walked along the main waterfront called the Bund which follows the Huangpu River.

 It was amazing to see all the high rise buildings – the Shanghai tower (632m – almost twice the Eiffel Tower) and the World Financial Centre along with the purple Pearl TV Tower with rusty old container ships sailing past as the river is a main shipping line. Although the city was clean the river was not! It was full of rubbish and lots of plastic and the colour was muddy brown.

I have put in a photo of what it would look like without the pollution haze! Dad was stunned at the development in the last 20 years as that was when he was there last. We had a lovely day seeing the city and catching up with David – after dinner we took the bullet train to the airport to do the last leg of our trip. I loved watching the speed going from 0 to 300km/h in 1.5 minutes.

 It usually goes over 400km/hr but slows down at night for some reason. The taxi took around an hour in the morning – this took 7.5 minutes!! We had a fabulous holiday – 7 countries, many 1000’s of kilometres, various modes of transport and (mostly) fabulous experiences later we arrived home to see the fireworks in New Brighton from our lounge window. Quite a cool way to finish off an amazing 11 weeks!!