Saying Goodbye (Quickly) May 8, 2010

I got up before 7:00 and had an American style breakfast, a bacon and egg sandwich on toast. We were supposed to leave at 7:45 to make a train to the airport, but in fact with all the sortation of baggage into separate piles and general sluggishness of the people, we didn’t actually leave until an hour later, at 8:45. At Longyang Station we made our way through the first of what would prove to be many security checkpoints to the train platform. The arrival of the train was the last of the many, many entertainments which our hosts had in store for us, as this was the world famous maglev connection to Pudong Airport.

L-R: Mickey, Marina, and Sonia waiting to board the maglev train.

Magnetic levitation is a new technology whereby the property of magnets of the same polarity to repel each other is used to lift the entire train off of the surface it is resting on and the successive change of polarities along the surface is used to pull the train forward. Since there is a space between the body of the train and the “track,” there is no friction except from the surrounding atmosphere and the train can fly faster than any other form of ground transport. In our case the train’s speed increased rapidly to about 270 miles per hour and held that speed until we arrived directly at the airport about five minutes later.

Once we had passed the formidable security apparatus, a number of us sat around drinking coffee until it was time to board. The actual departure took place a mere 15 minutes after it was scheduled. On this flight, the electrical outlet positioned on the back of the seat immediately in front of me works. This means that since we took off and began the 14 hour flight, I have been able to write four blog entries and save the words for posting when I arrive home this afternoon, by the clock a mere four hours or so after I left China.

Speed indicator aboard maglev train = 268.75 mph.

I suppose it would have made sense to sing a song in the airport as a way of punctuating the end of our fabulous tour in China. However, by the time we would have gathered, so many people had fallen away to take separate itineraries that there was hardly enough of a chorus to make it happen, and many of them were either buying last minute gifts or looking for the place to change their Chinese money back into dollars. C’est la vie.