20250914 Sunday, September 14, 2025 Shanghai Day 2

20250914 Sunday, September 14, 2025 Shanghai Day 2

It rained pretty hard last night after we got back from our excursion.  This morning the sky was partly cloudy with a 40% chance of showers in the afternoon.  It was still 86ºF and 84% humidity at 8:30am when our excursion began.  We loaded up into a bus and headed to the Shanghai Tower. There were about 20 in our group, so it was a more manageable size.

The Shanghai Tower is the tallest building in China, and depending on how you define a building’s height, it is either the second or third highest building in the world.  The Burj Khalifa is currently the tallest at 2717ft.  Including spires, the Merdeka in Malaysia is the second tallest at 2227ft and the Shanghai Tower is third at 2073ft. Excluding the spires and based on number of occupied floors and highest occupied floor, the Shanghai Tower is second.

We discovered that you have to go down to go up in this building.  The elevator to the observation deck is boarded from the second basement level.  It is an unusual elevator design in that it uses pneumatic pressure and not cables or hydraulics to operate, so we are literally sucked up the building.  These are the world’s fastest elevators, ascending at a rate of 80m/s, going from B2 to floor 118 in 55 seconds. 

These elevator and building are not pressurized, so our ears were popping repeatedly during the rapid ascent.  The ascent was surprisingly quiet and smooth.  Vertical acceleration was gradual at first, so it was gentler than normal cable or hydraulic elevators.  There are no windows, but there is a video display showing the elevator’s speed, elevation, and floor numbers whizzing by.  

From the 118th floor we took stairs up to the 119th floor where the building’s internal dampener mechanism is located.  This is a structure to counteract wind forces during typhoons, and the pendulum-like weight weighs 100 Tons.  

Instead of an unimaginative stack of lead bricks or concrete blocks, the dampener mass is a sculpted structure looking a bit like an egg casing or even lady parts of some alien species sitting on a platform suspended by enormous steel cables. 

 
The building dampener is open for viewing at specific times of the day, and during the opening, they do a multimedia show using the dampener as a focal point of the show. It really does lean in to this being some mysterious entity within the building. 

 
We did get an opportunity to then spend time on the observation deck taking pictures. We were fortunate that the cloud deck was high enough for us to have a view of the city and river delta spread out around us, although there was a significant degree of haze limiting visibility.  Out guide said there have been many times they have going up there and seen absolutely nothing because the observation deck was stuck in the clouds. 

We were able to look down upon the surrounding landmark skyscrapers including the Oriental Pearl Tower, “Bottle Opener” Shanghai World Financial Center(SWFC), the pagoda-like Jin Mao building, and the Bund.  There is an impressive amount of boat traffic on the Huangpu river, which snakes its way through Shanghai.  The SWFC was originally designed with a circular opening at the top. The Japanese developers said it was supposed to echo the circular forms of the Oriental Pearl Tower, but it really looked like the Rising Sun of Japan over the Shanghai skyline, which went over like a lead balloon. So they had to change the design to the rectangular opening which now makes it look like a giant beer bottle opener.

Our final stop was a visit to the Shanghai Museum East.  When we visited in 2006, the Shanghai Museum was in a round building on the Bund side of the river.  But Shanghai now has a new Museum in a huge rectangular building with scalloped walls in Pudong or east side of the river.  Most of the most important artifacts and exhibits now reside in this new museum.  

The museum is a huge building with 4 floors of exhibits laid out around the perimeter of the building with a huge open central atrium.  It is organized into galleries by content themes such as Bronze, Jade, Calligraphy, Painting, Archaeology, and Sculpture, as well as exhibition galleries.  

We were given English audio guides and a map of the museum, and were on our own to explore for 2 hours, but that was not nearly enough time.  We could have easily spent 4-6 hours exploring all the galleries, but had to limit ourselves to a handful, so we saw the Archaeology, Jade and Calligraphy galleries, as well as a quick sweep through one of the Exhibition galleries with an exhibition of Western Chinese history and artifacts.  

There is a ton of fascinating artifacts on display and most have at least some English explanatory information. However, the English audio guides were useless.  They used some sort of weird technology where something embedded in the ceilings would activate the guides as you wore them around your neck.  They would then automatically start to explain something.  However, it seemed nearly completely random when a voice would come on in your ears talking about an exhibit item nowhere in sight.  For example, you could be standing in front of a vase, and the audio explaining a jade sword hilt would come on, and there’d be no jade sword hilt even in the room.  You couldn’t point the guide at sensors for any particular exhibit because they were cleverly hidden in the blackened ceiling.  It was a total technological failure.  

We would have preferred to have someone with local expertise walk us through the most important artifacts in each gallery as a highlights tour, and then have time to explore independently after a brief and quick highlights tour.  That was how they did it at the Grand Egyptian Museum during our Nile River cruise, and that worked really well.

We got back to the ship and enjoyed some time in the thermal spa and relaxing before the ship set sail. Janet managed to get another load of laundry done, this time without being sabotaged.

 
The ship left its mooring on the Bund as the sun was setting and buildings all around us started lighting up with their giant light shows.  However, Ben noticed that we were traveling backwards a really long distance away from the Bund before the boat finally stopped and spun its bow around as dinner cruise boats were threatening to ram us broadside.  We sailed away under the Yangpu bridge, which is one of the world’s longest cable stayed bridges.  

The ship had a special local seafood stew on the Aquavit Terrace which lured us to the stern of the ship for the views of the sail away, which was very memorable.  The outside temperature was still about 87ºF with 79% humidity, but at least there was a bit of a cooling breeze.  The ship had complementary special sail away cocktails with a mango smoothy blended with vodka.  

Tomorrow is another sea day for us.  Members of our prior winning trivia team flagged us down as we watched the sail away from the Aquavit Terrace to make sure we’d be available to team up again.  How could we say no?