Day 3 - Shanghai & Yichang

Our last stop in Shanghai was at the silk rug factor.  The rugs made here were incredibly intricate and super expensive!  These rugs are graded by the quality of the fabrics used and also by the size and number of knots per square inch.  We learned how the term "magic carpet" came to be.  If you take the most expensive of these rugs and turn it around 180 degrees, they look like completely different rugs.  Really neat to see.  Check it out below.

From there we went to the Huang Po airport for our flight to Yichang on Shanghai Airlines.  Our flight was 10 minutes late leaving and they made a HUGE deal about it and kept making annoucments and appologizing.  Far cry from the US.  Also being an Asian airline we were concerned that the leg room would be sparse but again we were super surprised to have plenty of room in coach. The airline itself was still a full-service airline with a hot meal on all flights and a very well dressed staff.

The Yichang airport was super tiny.  It had 3 real gates and two walk up gates from the tarmac.  Yichang is considered a "town", not even a city and it is over 4 million people.  It was here we boarded the CenturyStar, our riverboat cruise ship for the next 4 nights.  The boat looked "weathered" on the outside but the inside was better than I was expecting based on the reviews I had read.

On our way to the boat, we stopped at a couple of overlooks to see the river, the 3rd largest in the world.  I was able to wade in the river and it was freezing! I couldn't believe there were people swimming in it!