Last week didn't have a Monday

On Sunday we departed LAX for a 17.5 hour flight on Singapore Airlines across the Pacific Ocean to Singapore. This is the second time on a cross Pacific flight I have managed to find time to sleep for around 8 hours. That is a good thing when you are in one place for that amount of time. The other time was spent eating, reading, and catching up on some movies like Juno, The Kingdom, and Michael Clayton. If you haven't seen The Kingdom then it is a must see, great movie. We landed in Singapore and then had a short layover, caught a flight to Shanghai, and landed on Tuesday at noon. Left LA on Sunday, arrived in Shanghai on Tuesday...gotta love the International Date Line.

Unfortunately that meant the time spent in Shanghai was somewhat influenced by jet lag, although it wasn't too bad. On Tuesday night we went to the Oriental Pearl Tower, one of the signature landmarks on the Pudong side of Shanghai. Pudong is China's financial and commercial center, home to many of the world's tallest buildings, and it is across the Huangpu River from the Bund and Puxi - the older parts of Shanghai. The Pearl Tower was built in 1994 and started the construction boom that is now Pudong (used to be farmland). Why did we go up in the Pearl Tower? It is one of the world's tallest towers, the complex has 11 spheres, and in one of the largest spheres hundreds of feet in the air we had dinner in a revolving restaurant with great views of Shanghai. Next door is the World Financial Center (Google this building), a behemoth of a building with 101 stories, it will be the 3rd tallest in the world when completed this year.

The next two days were spent working - a.k.a. visiting international schools. The most exciting of which was our attempt to find the British Int'l School and that involved our cab driver stopping and asking people on the street where to go, as every Chinese person near the intersection stared at the two gringos sitting in the backseat. China does not have GPS or any navigation systems (again, blocked), so it is always a wild ride attempting to find locations like these international schools. After two days of work we boarded a domestic Air China flight (beef or chicken for dinner) for Beijing.