19-22 04 2014        Previous entry     Next entry

Hello China.
My first moments in China didn’t went so well cos’ I forgot my phone at the airport to the wrong side of the customs. F*ck. Guys were laughing at me.. they noticed me leaving my phone there and silently recovered it right after. Well, I must say, they had a reasonable cause to laugh..!

First impression of China was really a mind blow. Both in good and bad ways. First we took the Maglev train from the airport which reaches the speed of 430 km/h. Wow. Then while transferring to the subway we noticed that there is security check to the subway. Eventually we learned that the security check is because there was this knife massacre at the subway on March 1st 2014. A group of some ten attackers dressed in black attacked innocent passengers at Kunming station resulting 34 dead and more than 140 wounded.

Saturday’s plans were to go to the Shanghai circuit to see the Formula 1 qualifications. It didn’t turn out well. We didn’t get our hostel room in time and still we were late even we took taxi to the circuit. No worries, the venue itself made a big impression and there was still the race on Sunday.

We had agreed to have a dinner after the qualification with our Shanghai guide Sanna, a friend of mine from my hometown Lammi. Sanna obviously knew the hotspots of Shanghai, cos’ after the dinner we headed to this one rooftop bar alongside the Huangpu River flowing through Shanghai and we met few fellows there working for the Mercedes Benz F1 team. It didn’t helped the bad rainy weather at all when the guys said that the view from the very same rooftop was crystal clear last year.

Learned a lesson from Saturday and we woke up early on Sunday. We were on the track over an hour before the race started. It was a surprise that you didn’t need any earplugs. Cars were super silent, they had made changes to the engines before the season. But never mind, red lights went off and the race started!

The race itself wasn’t really a success to Finns, Bottas finished 7th and Raikkonen 8th. I wonder if they didn’t see us waving the Finnish flag..! But our afterparty was superrrRR! Sanna was also waving the Finnish flag during the race with some Finnish exchange students and her friends from Finland’s embassy to China. We headed to the Aalto-Tongji Design Factory in Tongji University with them. There we had pizzas and beers and had a WOODEN heated sauna on a ROOFTOP with birches brought from FINLAND. And of course somebody had some Jaloviina brought from Finland. The evening was spectacular. And I must say that the world definitely is small, since I met this Hanna there who comes from the very same small town Lieksa from where our band’s bass player is from..

Monday was dedicated to see the sights. We saw the Bund, the Fake Market, the SWFC, the Oriental Pearl and the view of the city from the SWFC’s 100th floor with elevation of 474 meters. That’s the highest I’ve ever been inside a building..

Regards

Henri