China and Japan

I'm going to Shanghai for a conference. Then, Tokyo and Kyoto afterwards just for fun. Bye for now...
First I had to make it through a lot of flying (12 hours + 3 hours). Layover in the Tokyo airport, where I dozed in a zombie-like state for several hours.

I arrived in Shanghai several minutes after the last high-speed monorail of the day. Instead of 1.5 hours, it would now take 3 hours to get to my destination. So I decided to take a taxi; someone actually offered me a ride and I was extremely suspicious of this (in New York this would be asking for trouble). Didn't seem to get that continuing to reassure me that he was official may not actually convince me of this fact! But he was associated with an actual shuttle company.

The Pudong airport, by the way, is massive. One huge building that stretches sideways for all the security/baggage/checkpoint needs. A fair amount of pollution visible from the air. I felt like I was landing into a Blade Runner universe.

My taxi ran into another car. Of course. We both pulled over and there was a cop car right there (I think the first car had braked because he saw the cop). The two drivers were discussing this quite politely for at least ten minutes before the cop bothered to figure out what was going on. Photos were taken. Felt very third-world.

The roads are strangely large and uniform. Also there are traffic cameras mounted to all the overhead structures, every 100 metres or so, that are constantly flashing. Every car is having its license plate photo taken literally several times a kilometer. Yay big data. So that was weird.

But I made it. Cool view from floor 38. Time for sleep.