When I went to pick up my sister from Pudong International Airport (she will stay with us for five weeks, doing an internship at a hospital here), I took the Shanghai Transrapid. It was my third (and fourth) time on this magnetic levitation train, but the other times it did not travel at top speed, which fortunately it did today. 431 kmh, wow. The thirty kilometres trip only takes eight minutes.

There is a museum attached to the train station, which explains the history of (and predicts a bright future for) magnetic levitation trains. I suppose if this is going to happen, it has to happen in China. At least in Germany, where the technology was developed (it is a Siemens train), not a single route has been built, because of high construction costs and opposition of the communities along the track. Even here, a proposed extension of the current line towards Shanghai's other airport via the Expo site has met with a lot of resistance and been suspended. It does look like a 169 kilometres long inter-city connection to neighbouring Hangzhou is going to be built, though.