Day 1 - Flight and arrival.

I had forgotten just how long that flight is. We took off from Rochester, as scheduled and after connections, we boarded a Delta 777-200ES (a big plane) for our 7300 mile Detroit to Shanghai flight. As expected, it was brutally long, and we couldn't have been happier to touchdown at the Shanghai-Pudong airport.

We arrived in Shanghai, China around 6:50 PM (China time) on Tuesday, August 29, 2012 and by the time we had made it through customs, it was almost 8 PM. The only snafu was that one of Coach Phil's bags did not make the flight over. A little hassle, but they assured us that the bags would reach us within a day. Sure enough, as expected, Jiang and Wei (our 2 friends and hosts), and Sandy (our interpreter) were waiting for us on the other side of customs. After a 20-hour day, we were pretty beat but we certainly were hungry too. They whisked us away in our Mercedes caravan and we were off to Shanghai City Center (Pudong) for some dinner and a few night time sites. We dined at a very famous (did not catch the name) Shanghai restaurant with our group (Jiang, Wei, Sandy, Coach Tim, Coach Phil and my brother Coach Dan - who is the head coach at Monroe Community College and who took the trip with us).

Dinner was great. We spent about 2 hours catching up with our friends and meeting new ones. One of Jiang's friends in Shanghai hosted us and his name is Claude (Chinese typically will offer American names to themselves to make it easy for us). Turns out that Claude is an executive at a wine company here in Shanghai and along with dinner, we shared several VERY expensive bottles of wine (one was a tasty Red from 1997 that costs about 6000 RMP - or $500 USD). It was quite a special time to reconnect with our old friends. I forgot just how Welcoming the Chinese People are.

Coach Dan, Jiang, Coaches Tim, Wei, Phil and Claude

After dinner, Claude had arranged for a couple drivers for us and we drove around to a few cool locations in the city and took some pictures. Shanghai is HUGE. With a population in the city proper at 23 Million people, it is considered the LARGEST CITY in the world. We spent our night in the Pudong section of the town, which is right alongside the Huangpu River. Pudong is the heart of Shanghai's Finance District. We drove to the Oriental Pearl Tower (a Shanghai landmark) and took pictures for about an hour before calling it a night.

During dinner, Jiang gave us a little bit of what we'd be doing for the week, and who we'd be seeing. I won't ruin any surprises here, but suffice it to say........... This trip is going to be SPECTACULAR. More to come later......

Downtown Pudong, Shanghai, Peoples Republic of China

Thats all for now. More to come later......

Coach Tim