If you are coming to Shanghai these days, be aware that Shanghai is really cold. It rains (for many days), and the temperature drops to 8°C. Today, we turned on warm air-con for the first time this winter.

So bring rain coat, and bring warm cloths with you if you plan to visit Shanghai.

At 6:30 PM, it rained, and there were no taxi at all on street. I tried to call taxi reservation hotline, for example, 62580000 for Jinjiang, and 968222 for Dazhong. It simply does not work. It is always busy line. After about 10 minutes, I got through and not surprisingly, they don’t have any taxi available. The whole city seems to stop working for me. Wendy waited for a taxi for about one hour before she got one.

Winter comes, and people’s life should get tougher in Shanghai.

Ashamed? No

I saw comments on my previous entry Lining Up for Metro?. I saw the same thing, but I feel the different way.

Seeing the bad things in China does not affect my proud of my nationality. There must be optimistic people within a country to try everything he/she can to help, or make progress (no matter how small it is). A real confident nation, just like a confident person, should not shy away from facing the bad things.

For example, history is part of the identity of a country. By facing the history, no matter it is good or bad ,demostrates the confidence of the country. It is the same for the bad things.

I feel bad about people’s misbehavior, but I don’t feel bad to be part of the people here. Just because I care, I write, and I bring the topic. I hope more people care about what is going on, and encourage people to write about it and talk about it.

These days, I found Shanghai’s Weather in early Oct is very like Sydney.

When I stepped out of the China Eastern Airlines flight MU562 from Sydney to Shanghai, I didn’t feel any difference in the temperature. I sweat a shirt in Sydney and in the noon time, a T-Shirt is OK. It is the same in Shanghai.

Later, I found out that it is exactly the date that Shanghai and Sydney are the same in weather.

The Two City Mirror Each Other Along the Equator

Shanghai is at 31°N 121°E;

Sydney is at 33°S 151°E.

On September 23, 2006, the Sun went directly onto the the Equator.

About 10 days after Sept 23, I guess the Sun moved to Sydney a little bit, so moved to exactly the middle of the two cities. Afterwards, Shanghai is going to autumn and winter, Sydney is going to spring and summer.

This time in Sydney, the biggest different in the South Semi-sphere for me is, the Sun shines on the north, instead of South in China.

We are going to enter October.

October is among the best weather in Shanghai (if not contain spring in April). Typically, it is not hot and not cold – just the best time for people to live and visit.

A T-shirt can do and a sweater is also OK. The autumn comes. As the old sayings put it, it is the time you can wear whatever you want – not so hot and not so cold.

The average temperature in Shanghai in Oct is 18°C (66°F). The average high temperature is 22°C (72°F) and average low temperature is 15°C (59°F), according to the previous 21 years of record

The reason I wrote about this topic is, I found there are many hits from Google to my site when searching for “Shanghai Weather in Oct”

The temperature of Shanghai dropped by more than 10 °C these days and it becomes very cold at morning and night. The autumn comes to Shanghai. Wendy and I have caught cold these days due to the sudden change in temperature. I am still not used to wear jacket. The summer didn’t go in my mind but the Autumn does arrive. Please take care and bring more clothes if you come to Shanghai.

It is clear and the sky is blue – very nice whether to take pictures and go outting. It is 16 °C to 26 °C already and is becoming colder everyday.

Tomorrow Square near the People’s Square. Photo by my brother Jian Feng Wang, who is visiting Shanghai these days

Details of Jin Mao Tower. Photo by my brother Jian Feng Wang, who is visiting Shanghai these days

P.S There are parachuting from Jin Mao tower at 2:00 PM tomorrow afternoon. I hope I will be there to see people jumping from the top of the Jin Mao Tower – of cause they have all the protection they need.

Cold Shanghai

Shanghai became cold from yesterday. Compared to the hot weather this September, it is hard to believe it is the same city. I wore T-shirt for the whole summer and just changed to shirt yersterday. However, the sudden drop in temperature gave me a big surprise. It was really cold last night. I was almost frozen before I found a taxi and escaped into the warm cab. So I withdraw my suggestions to those coming to Shanghai – at night, you need to wear coat instead of shirt. :-)

Hotmail inaccessible in China

According my a lot of my friend, they cannot access hotmail.com via China Telecom – the major ISP in China. People get very confused. They still can access MSN Messenger, just to see the number in mail box keeps increasing but cannot read it, or delete it. This has been lasted for quite a while. Along Hotmail is the Yahoo!Messenger. Lots of my friends encountered technical difficulties to connect to that service. Is there any relationship between this and the Google Ban?

When there is nothing to talk about, people usually choose to talk about weather. It is the case for me recently. Life is so busy for me and I feel lucky enough to still be able to find sometime to write something on this blog every day instead of leaving blank pages. However, it seems the only topics I can share is about the weather. According to Yahoo!Weather, the coming week in Shanghai is a thunderstorm week.

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Thunderstorms will last till next Tuesday.

Long National Holiday

There is something special recently – the coming national holiday. It is a long vacation from Oct 1 to Oct 7. This is unique in China since the national holiday is actually 3 days (Oct 1 to Oct 3), but combined with the weekend of Oct 4 and Oct 5, and shifted the working days with Sept 27 and Sept 28, the holiday become very long.

The holiday is also called the golden week since it will generate exteremely huge market for local travel industry – the travel agencies, the hotels and transportation industries….

I learnt that the travel price from Shanghai to Hainan (including round trip air tickets, 5 days and four nights, and 3-star hotels and some gate tickets) is only 1380 RMB for groups leaving at Sept 24. The price for the same group leaving at Sept 28 raised to 2600 RMB and for Oct 1 tour, the price is above 3000 RMB. The golden holiday is the major time for people to travel and relax, especially when the May long vacation was canceled this year due to SARS.

After so many weeks’ extremely high temperature, Shanghai finally becomes cooler. After the rain, it is only 28 degree C now. This will be a piece of great news for those who plan to travel to Shanghai.

SARS Alert

After reporting SARS case in Singapore yersterday, the Shanghai Morning Post published in the same location that WTO claim that the case in Singapore is not confirmed. However, Shanghai is so alerted that the contigency plan in both airport and travel agencies have been started to filter passengers from Singapore for SARS symptoms or warn people who planned to go to Singapore. I am satisfied with the quick response from the local tourism industries. This definitely shows that the systematic prevention measures have been established already to treat the protential SARS threat.