Shanghai and Japan from the air

Shanghai

I was preparing to leave Shanghai. My roommate took me to an extremely hidden food place and I had sesame-sesame-soup balls that were pretty tasty.

The air pollution didn't seem that bad really, but I was wearing a mask most of the time. I went to the airport. (Even though this was a regional airport, there was some western influence:)

Once we took off, it was easy to see that it was still pretty smoggy. I'd classify this as a good day for Shanghai:

You can see here the sameness of groups of buildings that seems to happen in Shanghai. I guess they were all built at the same time probably by the state. I saw a power plant through the fog, it looked more like a nuclear plant than coal, which is a good sign I guess.

As we circled away from the city, visibility improved.

Just off the coast there were a huge number of ships. There was a line of tankers marked by buoys. Some were waiting for time in the harbour, I think. It was insane. At the point this picture was taken, I counted more than 40 large ships, container ships/cargo ships.

I've seen ships off the coast of San Francisco before, but nothing like this. It gave me a sense of the scale of Shanghai's economy. Craziness.

Japan

As we approached Japan, I had a great view of the coastline. I was impressed by the volcanoes (image enhanced)
and even more impressed with Mount Fuji, which is massive!
Just as we were circling around for a landing, the sun began to set over the horizon, and I had a perfect moment of Fuji with the sun setting. There are some pictures, and a video, but they don't really do this justice.

I landed. Managed to get my SIM card working despite lack of sleep (had to select 3G-only before my phone let me change the APN settings. what?). Ate an apple strudel. Got on a train to the city. I'd landed at the Haneda regional airport, intentionally, so that the travel was easy.

The Japanese train had all kinds of gadgets and places to store things and shaped seats. A lot of things here are like that. The bathrooms are complicated, the water fountains can practically be configured for the exact temperature you want, etc. More later. That's it for now.