This is my account of the final day of travel, and because I am currently sitting in my room back in Hong Kong, I am eschewing the paper notebook for the faster, and somewhat less hand-tiring task of recording everything by hand.
I woke up at 8:00, and then took a really long time to get going. I chatted with the guy from ASU, packed, and then rewrote my postcards in pen. Then I had to get stamps and breakfast, not in that order. I was told that the nearby bookstoreish (just 4 doors down from the hostel) sold stamps, but opened at 11, so I waited and ate breakfast with Sophie and Anne (the breakfast was ostensibly the “British breakfast” but didn’t quite meet those standards). When I failed to find stamps at the bookstore, I grabbed my gear, said goodbye to all, and caught a cab to the post office. There, I mailed my cards and caught another cab, still laden with backpack, duffel (with attached scroll) and pipa, to the Suzhou train station. The train from Suzhou to Shanghai was a shinkansen, so the journey was quick, and on it I received helpful advice from a Chinese business woman sitting next to me.
Once in Shanghai, I did not have much time to waste. Following the woman’s advice, I caught the metro to People’s Square (Renmin Guanshang, I think) and from there to Longyang. In Longyang, I took the “Demonstration Maglev Train” (or something) to Shanghai-Pudong International Airport, and I must say, that thing was fast…The fifty kilometer journey was over in about 7 minutes, primarily because when we reached our top cruising speed, we were going at 432 km/h, or about 264 mph for those unacquainted with metric. The entire car shook from the air resistance. I know it was that, because the whole train is magnetic levitation, so it was hovering about 6 inches from the track. For the record, the train was impressively fast…
At the airport, I got checked in without much hassle, although I accidentally claimed the pipa was for her father, and not for my own when I tried to speak in Putonghua. I ate an extremely overpriced lunch/dinner at the airport where I performed a separation experiment on my glass of kiwi/sprite juice, and then caught the flight to Shenzhen. I was a little worried for the Pipa on the flight, but everything went fine due to the kindness of one attendant, (although another didn’t notice me wince when he shoved a bag on top of the pipa case).
At Shenzhen, I decided to make things easier for myself, if not a little pricier (it only costed about $10 than it would have otherwise) and took the airport-border-Hong Kong shuttle bus back home. The bus drove us to customs, where my bags were inspected, and I annoyed the agent a little when I didn’t have an “invoice” (it took me a while to figure out what he was saying through his accent, and even longer to realize he meant: did I keep the receipts for my gifts?), but all went smoothly. Then the bus finally dropped me off at Kowloon station. Turns out, Kowloon station is almost as you could possibly be away from HKUST by metro, and I had to take 13 stops to get back to Choi Hung station. Once there, I had NO idea where to go, because I was in an unfamiliar part of the station and couldn’t find the busses. Fortunately, I ran across two English speaking Chinese girls, who both turned out to live in the Bay Area and were on a cultural exchange for the summer with their university, and they showed me where to find the bus stop. I got to Tai Po Tsai safely after that, unpacked to the minimum extent, and then rushed to HKUST to say thank you and farewell to Xiao, who is going to Japan (he left this morning at 6:00 AM). I walked back to the village with Shuyu and Jinbo, and then watched a few episodes of “The West Wing,” showered, and got into the first REALLY clean clothes in a while, and went to sleep.
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