The flight to Chicago was not bad, albeit early in the morning. The flight from Chicago to Shanghai was pretty much miserable. We flew on a gigantic plane (777 I believe), which had two stories and dozens of couch-like seats in first class. Unfortunately, myself and the other 26 Villanova MBA and undergraduate students on the China trip were in economy class, which meant we were huddled like cattle into a restrictive, confined space for a 7,000+ mile, 14+ hour flight over Canada, Russia, Japan, parts of the Pacific Ocean, and eventually landing in Shanghai China.
To add to the flight's misery, United decided to show a whopper four-some of fine films: The Holiday (starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet), Catch and Release (starring Jennifer Garner), Freedom Writers (starring Hillary Swank), and Music & Lyrics (starring Drew Barrymore and the delightfully repulsive Hugh Grant - England's finest export since colonialism). In my book, the four films struggled to get an aggregate rating of four stars. Particularly insipid was the predicitable similarity of all four cheesy romantic comedy plot lines - even without the aid of my high-quality United Airlines headphones.
Further adding to my passenger plight, the gentleman in front of me developed a talent for violently throwing his seat back into the reclined position, particulary at times when my patellas and/or cranium were especially vulnerable. Throw on some grappling for elbow room with the two students smothered upon each side of you, and you've got yourself a really enjoyable 14 hours.
Once we landed in China, things began to get better, however. Shanghai's airport is brilliantly humongous, and there was not a speck of litter or dirt anywhere. After getting through customs (I didn't declare the illegal Cuban cigars in my suitcase) and immigration, we all boarded a bus to our quarters at East China Normal University - a compound-like campus of lush gardens, ponds, streams and well-manicured buildings amidst a booming outside city. Much of the drive from the airport to the city itself was occupied with miles of incredible large-scale landscaping. Rows of trees and shrubs symmetrically decorated the shoulders of the busy highway, while the median was one, continuous expanse of carefully crafted, geometrically unique plant beddings. The scale of the public landscaping project was unlike anything I had ever seen. Overhead, the magnetic tracks for the elevated bullet train (reaching 260 mphs) dotted the landscape - typifying the unique blend of traditionalist respect for nature and the booming economic and infrastructural growth of a modern technological mecca.
On the drive to the downtown, I was overwhelmed at the rate of development and construction. For every skyscraper already in place, there were two or three going up - and nearly all of them residential. Cloud-topping apartment buildings passed across the bus windows, only to reveal another row of such gigantic marvels being built on the land behind them. Unfortunately, the thick smog and pollution, evident from the unregulated nature of China's twenty year economic boom made it such that the otherwise magnificient skyline was hard to makeout. (See below for pictures of Shanghia skyline during drive in from airport to campus).
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