In September, 2005, Gigi and I went to Hong Kong to see her immediate family and then flew up to Shanghai to meet her extended family. This was a fun and slightly stressful trip, but definitely worthwhile.
Here we are in Hong Kong with her family that lives in HK.

Gigi, me, and Gigi's neice, Zi Yan outside the floating boat restaurant.

In Shanghai with many of Gigi's cousins, aunts, and uncles. We went to the outskirts of Shanghai to see the traditional parts of Shanghai.

I tried to get Gigi's mom to sit on my lap for this picture, but she refused to.

A river boat ride we took to tour the area.

Gigi's sisters (Angela and Jane), me, and Gigi's cousin (Song Song) on a river tour of Shanghai. Song Song was wonderful and drove us (driving in Shanghai is quite scary) around all week.

Shanghai skyline at night

Angela and Jane acting line Chairman Mao as the Chinese flag flaps in the wind.

Gigi particularly likes the building on the left.

Typical view of Shanghai. This is what many of the entrances to expressways look like.

Dinner with many more of Gigi's family. We ate a lot of food, but this year, I was not known as the garbage disposal - I must be getting too old for that....

Shanghai built a MagLev train from PuDong to the airport. The train itself is pretty cool. It reaches a top speed of 431 kilometers/hour (about 250 mph). But, it only stays at that speed for about 10 seconds before it starts slowing down again. In the engineering world, this is called bang-bang control, which is optimal for time, but wastes a lot of energy since the train is constantly accelerating (either forward or backward) and never maintains a constant speed. It's quite smooth in the forward/backward direction, but much more jerky in the left/right direction than I imagined it would be. Economically, this train isn't going to do too well. It's a pain to get to from most of Shanghai. It would have cost me about 65 Yuan (~$8) to take a taxi versus 53 Yuan (~$6.50) to take the Metra to the MagLev and it took about the same amount of time. Other than the experience, there wasn't much reason to take it. It's too expensive and doesn't add enough convenience.