It was another early morning as we headed to Ocean East International Logistics for a site visit. They are an intermediate warehouse where companies store their products so that the companies can always have stock for when customers order there product. We also discussed one of the major problems that is facing the laboring industry, and that is a huge decrease in the number of available workers. Many children in China are expected to get into white collar businesses and blue collar jobs have become less and less desirable to the newer generations. in order to solve this problem of a lack of labor, Ocean East has started using autonomous vehicles in their warehouses so that they do not need to employ so many people. We got to see the automated machines in action as they put away palates. The forklifts still had seats so that they could be manually operated, but seeing them drive around and work without anyone in the seat was almost eerie in a way.
After seeing the automated robots, we traveled to Yang Shan Port. It is the largest deep water port in the world. An addition that they added on in the past year was larger than the port that they have on Los Angeles. Its incredible size was amazing to hear about, but to see it in person was an amazing experience. There were thousands of boxes stacked all down the coast of the island. There were also some ships that were being unloaded while we were there and the ships themselves seemed like they could have been islands because of how big they were.
The port was an incredible sight to see, but my favorite thing was how we got to the port. The port takes up almost a whole island and to get there you need to drive over the third longest bridge in the world. The bridge was thirty kilometers long, or about eighteen miles, and it took us about a half hour to drive all the way across. I have never been on a bridge that I could not see the other side of and this bridge felt like it went on forever. On our trip across the bridge, we passed dozens of windmills that were in the water. All of the energy that the windmills produced was given to the port to use. As one of the largest exporters in the world, I guess China needs the worlds largest port more than anyone.
For dinner, me and a couple friends decided to get something other than Chinese food, so we started roaming Shanghai in hopes to find a non-chines food style restaurant. We ended up at an urban mediterranean style restaurant that had American categories for food, but had their own special twist. I got a burger and instead of beef for the patty, they used lamb. It turned out to be surprisingly good and I am glad that my first experience with lamb turned out to be a good one so that I can try other lamb dishes in the future.
The days are long, but somehow still flying by. I cannot wait to see how much we can fit into these last few days!