The central staircase for the apartment building is cement and dirty. The trash collection infrastructure comprises little old ladies who come by in the morning and pick up whatever's on the landings. Many people take advantage of this system by putting loose debris on the landings. Many surfaces in the stairwell are now stained oily brown or black thanks to this practice. Further, the rats like to come up the stairs and nibble at the garbage, including grawing through the plastic and scattering even bagged garbage. I had tuned this out, although I did notice that the rats were especially loud the other week. The Fishers decided to do something. They printed up little signs, in Chinese and English, asking people to put the garbage out in the morning, not the evening, so as to disincent the rats. They carefully taped the signs to the doors on both sides of all six floors.

This made no appreciable difference to the timing of garbage ejection or the frequency of rat incursions.

(Notice, please, the complete lack of judgmental tone or broad, over-generalized conclusions about "the Chinese," "the lingering effects of Mao's destruction of cultural bonds," "cognitive dissonance," or any other of my favorite whipping horse topics. And their presence in this paranthetical paragraph should not be construed to mean anything whatsoever.)

Mrs. Fisher wondered if I had noticed when the nearby building caught fire? Huh? We checked it out as we walked home after dinner and part of the top floor was blackened, as if by fire. Puzzling. We later looked in the day, and looked at the nearby buildings with similar colorations, and realized it was just dirt. A lot of dirt.

` 30 Apr 2002 - 1 May 2002

I'm reading a Hunter Thompson book on the train to Shanghai, and I'm noticing that he seems to like the same music I do. So far he's mentioned both Lyle Lovett and the Cowboy Junkies.

Soon after I sat down on my bottom bunk, a woman came by, sat down next to me, and started talking. In Chinese, of course. She asked if I was alone, and after first answering, mistakenly, that I wasn't British, I figured out what she wanted. Her daughter was in a nearby bunk, and she wanted to switch seats with me. Her bunk was five cars down. I was leery of messing around with tickets, and I made some noise about the ticket man, or, as I have the Chinese to say, "the man I gave my ticket to." And I wondered why her ticket was a slightly lower price than mine, even though we were making the same trip.

After she left, a young woman who had watched the whole thing asked, in fluent English, if I was going to trade with the other woman. Why not, I asked. Hers is not as good; her car is an exteension car. I thought for a minute - if she wants to be near her daughter, she could swap the other way - move her daughter to her car, or she could trade with any of a dozen other apparently singleton passengers in the nearby aisles. Concluding that the chance that I was getting, even if only mildly, shafted, was over 50 percent, I promptly and conveniently lost my Chinese before she came back.

This started a passive-aggressive standoff, in which she spent a lot of time sitting on my bunk. Other people, including the English-speaking woman, stayed carefully out of it. After she sat on my feet while I napped, I mounted a strategic withdrawl to a folding seat down the corridor.

Some general notes on the train trip:

The train station was hot and crowded, and the electronic signboard cycled though the manufacturer's name rather than any meaningful information. The music was maddeningly simple muzak with Chinese characteristics. But the announcements from the loudspeaker were more clearly audible than in any other waiting room I can remember, and were repeated in careful, remarkably good English. The train is air-conditioned, has LCD panels on the walls, metal hot-water machines instead of coal-stoked boilers, and ... the toilet is still a hole in the floor. And there are still cockroaches, despite the hourly passes by en-broomed attendants. I think that every single passenger, even the vomiting young boy in row six, has a cell phone. The preferred Chinese sock, a ghastly truncated nylon-stocking sort of thing, worn by both men and women, is very much in evidence. At some point in the middle of the night I woke up and realized that we were going full speed backwards. But this was apparently by design as, by the time I was up for good at 8 am, front was front again. And we were within five minutes of the schedule - frequently ahead - the entire 26 hours.

The annoying woman is spending a lot of time sitting on my bunk, so I'm spending a lot of time away from my bunk. Mid-afternoon a new guy showed up and, when he found her sleeping in his middle bunk, complained to the attendant, so she got out of his bunk and went back to sitting in ... my bunk.

2 May 2002

I spent four days and four nights in Shanghai, and the pattern was pretty much the same: wake up, pbj breakfast, read a little, then go downtown for the day. Some days I went out with Des and friends, and other days I went by myself on long walking/bus/subway tours.

I went out to lunch with Desmond's classmates from Hong Kong - Billy, in whose very posh, very western, very welcome Shanghai apartment Des, Steven, and I are all staying, and Steven, who is visting from Shenzhen. Lunch was dim sam in a Cantonese restaurant with several other Hong Kong classmates who also live in Shanghai. We found a few vegetarian things for me, including miniature custard-filled pumpkins complete with faux stems. After lunch I headed out on my own to see Shanghai. Metro to the Bund, the riverfront strip lined with old stone-faced buildings that make Shanghai look like a real city. Across the river is Pudong (the Huangpu river runs past Shanghai before reaching the nearby Pacific Ocean, Pudong means "east of Pu"), the new, second downtown in Shanghai. The skyline is noteworthy but not yet spectacular; Shanghai has more far more highrises than, for instance, Seattle, but they're spread out over the entire city, and the Pudong cluster isn't especially dense or attractive.

Next I traipsed a few miles to the Hangkou ghetto, where 20,000 Jews lived during World War II. Between an detailed English-only map printed from the internet, a Chinese-only city map, and bilingual street signs, I found the Ohel Moshe temple, now a museum charging a staggering 50 yuan for access to three or four rooms on the third floor. The wooden floor creaked fetchingly, the walls were lined with pictures and text, and while I was browsing the coffee-table books of foreign architecture in Shanghai, a handful of retired Jewish-American tourists off the cruise ship piled in. This triggered the full twenty-minute lecture, which was mildly interesting. I copied down two names from the 1942 directory, an Aufricht and a Rath (my grandmother's maiden name), but there doesn't appear to be any relation.

Then I walked to a nearby park with a memorial plaque. I read the plaque, chatted a little bit with a Chinese guy who was reading the Chinese part of the plaque. He was living in Shanghai during World War II but was too young to remember much, or much that he was willing to explain to someone who clearly only spoke a few words of Chinese.

Then I got back on a main street and hopped on the next bus. Once we took off, I turned to the guy sitting behind me, got out the map, and asked where we were going. Turns out that I was on the wrong bus - technically not, I suppose, since I hadn't defined a right bus yet - and he told me which bus to switch to at the next intersection. On that bus a woman showed me that in fact I could take the bus all the way home, instead of just to the subway station. Little victories....

That night we did Thai food. Reasonably good, very expensive (Y100 each). The restaurant had two Western maitres'd, and half the patrons were white. At the table next to us two women switched between French, English, and Chinese, based on two sentences of which Steven proclaimed them better than me. He spent the rest of the meal teaching me how to integrate dirty words into common Cantonese phrases like thank you.

The next day we had lunch with Xiao Rong's parents (Xiao Rong, Lyrica, is Des's wife, and was at a meeting in New York while I was in Shanghai). We met them at Xiao Rong's brother's apartment, in a northern suburb of Shanghai. It was of a style I'm getting used to: depressing cement architecture, a long trudge up a very dirty stairwell, and then a gorgeous, immaculate interior in a Western style with Chinese influences. He's an architect, and the color scheme of the apartment justified the manufacture of pastel paints. Very nice.

I am pleased to report that, in contrast to the insufferably pathetic and inert taxi drivers in most of China, Shanghai features international-caliber psychotic taxi drivers. And while the first taxi driver I met helped himself to a yuan tip, a later driver returned a third of the fare after he got helplessly lost on a one-mile trip.

I tagged along with Steven when he went to see an old girlfriend's former apartment, and then we went downtown to shop. I dropped over Y300 on books (a real english-language bookstore!) and found a genuine catcher's mitt (Y385 - passed) and a baseball that seemed to be leather over a solid wood sphere (Y25 - passed). Instead I bought some frisbees - unbranded, but with the little grooves that are the secret to frisbee flight. Still haven't had a chance to try them out, but they were very useful in intimidating the dog.

Oh yeah, the dog. Billy's wife stays at home during the day, in their very nice two-bed, two-bath apartment with hardwood floors and brand new, ultra-modern appliances. So a year ago they got a cute little puppy. This collie, Babay, is now at least 50 pounds bigger, clearly a medium, nearly a large dog. He has enough room to run about three full strides from the dining hall to the end of the living room. He slobbers, chews on cell phones, knocks things over, and generally behaves like a dog. He's gloriously inappropriate for the apartment, definitely not spiritually satisfied, and with Billy's wife out of town, it fell to us to meet his demands for attention. Poor dog.

A couple of times, as I sat in a cab ignoring the conversation (they all spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin, so I could follow exactly two words - "I" and "eat" - plus an obscene phrase that I still remember perfectly thirteen years after I learned it in Hong Kong, and which popped up startlingly frequently in their discourse), I realized the music was really good. Once was a Mandarin pop song with simple words that I could follow in part, and once was some soft jazz. Usually in the US soft jazz makes me change the station, but I had nothing better to do than listen, and it was really good. It was impossible to listen without imagining the guitar player's hands, and this contrasted strongly with typical Chinese modern music, in which if I visualized the musicians at all, it was as smiling automatons.

ok, this is getting long and I have to prepare for class tomorrow. So Shanghai goes on the long list of cities for which I've written up only the first half of my experiences. Bottom line: I feel much better than I did before the vacation and I think I'll be able to stick it out the last two months without losing any more sanity.

13 May 2002: The American Bar

We (Lu Dan, Zhang Ming's tall, cute cousin [the relationship is obvious but Zhang Ming should ask for a refund on his genes] but not Zhang Ming, Li Xu, Lu Dan's boyfriend, and I) went to the "American bar," actually called the Cow's Tail. It's adjacent to Guangxi Normal University, the main school in Guilin (GUET is a distant second). The bar was fun - a thatched ceiling made the noise much less painful than is typical for public spaces. Although a few songs were in English, most of the music was Chinese pop. I was impressed by how the manager/owner, an American, was able to cater to his clientele instead of imposing his own tastes (as I have done to disastrous results in class). After a few hours we moved over to the bar and chatted with him. He saw me looking through the CDs and said, "I've had enough of this Chinese stuff," and invited me to pick something good. After I complained that I could find very little tolerable Chinese music, he showed me a Cantonese band that was very good techno-rock. I would have had him write the name down but he said it was impossible to find. I really liked it. Lu Dan and Li Xu said it was "Western" and thought they were singing English.

A bit after midnight we decided to head home. But it had been raining for an hour or two. The small street in front of the bar was now a river, with up to ten inches of muddy running water, extending many blocks in each direction. (And it was still raining.) No taxis could make it, though army trucks would come through from time to time. Li Xu called a friend with a microbus, but he couldn't get near us. Eventually we rolled up our pants, grabbed hands, and waded a hundred yards or so to the waiting microbus. A very exciting end to the evening.

3 - 5 May 2002: Shanghai Part II

The next day I decided to walk the three miles to downtown on the main street. It's about five big blocks from Billy's apartment to the nearest metro station, a temple. More accurately, a fascinating structure in which the top floors comprise a new wooden temple in classical style, while the bottom two floors are a concrete Metro entrance. Apparently there's been a temple of some sort on this site for thousands of years, but nobody has a firm date for the Metro station.

Every time I walked anywhere from Billy's apartment I got lost. There are only two or three types of building in Shanghai: old two-story longtongs (old being fifty years, or maybe three hundred), relatively recent and very depressing Soviet concrete blocks five to eight stories high, and brand spanking new shiny marble buildings starting at twenty stories. Billy lives in one of the latter. Desmond said that Billy's building didn't represent the real Shanghai. Which is better, I asked. This is.

The half-mile or so to the metro takes in all three types of architecture in half-block increments, and within each style every street looks the same. The city streets go in all directions, and tend to make right-angle turns every two blocks. There's no pretense at a grid. Today I gave up any attempt at navigation and tried to walk to the other, further metro station. I ended up precisely at the temple station.

One intersection has a big digital sign showing the current noise level. It varied between 64 and 84. (Freeway traffic is 70 decibels.)

Once at the temple, I decided to just walk downtown on the street, which is a main drag and has lots of shops. I found a side-street pedestrian walkway at one point, and got a decent if watery and vague hot chocolate for Y25 at Mr. Coffee. A few shops down I got a mediocre chocolate mousse for Y12 at a French bakery. Mrs Coffee held a corner position at the other end of the street but I passed it up.

Halfway to downtown I hopped into the Metro after all and rode it under the Huangpu to Pudong. Pudong (East of Pu) is the new area of Shanghai, raised up from rice fields in the last decade. Skyscrapers, wide, tree-lined boulevards, empty roads. It bore very little resemblance to China.

I walked back towards the river, counted the stories on the pretty, tiered skyscraper, tried to go in to the Super Brand Mall but it wasn't open yet, and ended up on the waterfront. The river is perhaps two hundred yards across, and I was opposite the Bund. The Bund is twenty (I counted) old stone buildings, the shortest two stories and the tallest fifteen (I counted), built in the 1920s and 1930s. There are no bridges across this central section of the Huangpu, so the view is unobstructed. It looks nice.

I took the "Underwater Adventure" ride back across the river. For Y30, you cram into a small, ultra-modern box with thirty other people and ride on rails under the river, in a tunnel lined with blinking lights and loudspeakers. This was much more Chinese - gaudy and superficial.

I walked the length of the Bund and inspected all of the buildings. Most have a scarred stone block where original inscriptions were pried off or chipped away. The Peace Hotel, the "most famous hotel" in the world, now houses ABN Amro and Citibank branches.

Gargoyles! On the American International Assurance building. After that I looked hard but didn't see any others.

On one building the original inscription was partially legible: "LBY ALSTOM K.C.M.C. C.B." What could that mean?

The facades are rather dirty by now, and scarred with lights, cables, air-conditioning units, and surveillance cameras. Doubtless they look nice at night from across the river, but it was a shame to see the damage.

Finally I made it to the Shanghai Museum, my original destination. After ogling the kites in the People's Square outside, some of which seemed to be higher up than the bordering skyscrapers, I went inside to indulge my new museum obsession - looking at the bottoms of artifacts. This time, though, I couldn't find much that was obviously unfinished on the bottom. Even the furniture was lacquered underneath.

The money hall was nice, but the shortage of both English and Chinese explanation pushed it towards being an endless display of identical coins. There were a few stand-out features: the gold coins that are utterly untarnished and a thousand years old; the coins minted by the Heavenly Empire (a Christian rebellion in the 19th century), and weird two-thousand-year-old coins that looked like hoe blades.

Why does jade bore the tar out of me? I skipped the jade hall.

The hall of Minority Clothing was kinda cool. I saw some outfits that were very reminiscent of Native Alaskan clothes, and, lo and behold, they were "Orogen," from Huilongjiang, the northern province next to Siberia.

The Chinese are obsessed with seals (the stamps, not the mammal): even in the very modern Japanese department store, seals are integral to the purchasing process. After you pick up any piece of merchandise to contemplate a purchase, it is snatched from your hands in mid-fondle by a uniformed salesperson, who gives you a little slip of paper that you take to the cashier. After you pay, it is stamped extensively, and you then take the receipt and slip of paper (in duplicate) back to the original salesperson, who gives you your merchandise packed in a precisely sized plastic bag in exchange for the yellow slip. Call it Soviet retail with Chinese Characteristics. Anyway, in the Hall of Seals I was able to track the geneology of those department store seals back three thousand years.

I walked home, including an unintentional pass by the English bookstore which resulted in additional purchases, and, when my random walk put me there, I succumbed and enjoyed Mrs. Pizza. Like Mr Coffee, her wares were watery and bland - I don't know how you can make a veggie pizza watery and bland, but it was.

Later, I passed a Pizza Hut with a long line straight out of a nightclub scene.

Finally, late and unwilling to press my navigational luck further, I hopped in a taxi. The taxi driver promptly got lost. He did, though, charge me only the minimum Y10 on a Y15 fare.

Sunday morning Des and I were both up by ten, so after a pbj breakfast we went to walk to the other Jewish temple. Our misapprehension of the addressing system added an hour to our walk, but what most surprised me was just how crowded and busy everything was. Longtong alleys, giant boulevards and intersections, and just plain side streets - everything was crowded. The temple seemed very pretty - a boxy building completely covered with ivy and surrounded by gorgeous landscaped grounds. At least, that's what we could see through the gate. The temple now belongs to the Department of Education, and is closed to tourists without prior arrangement.

Des and I swung back to the apartment a bit after noon, only to find that Steven and Billy were still asleep. I qualified for my B license for Gran Turismo 3 on the PS2, and was working on my A license when Billy woke up and released Bebe, whose slobbering campaign interrupted my driving. A lunch outing was conceled when Steven realized his flight left in two hours, so they broke out the cards and I took off for my final Shanghai outing.

First stop: vegetarian quessidilla, at a foreign restaurant (Always Cafe) that I'd noticed the day before. It was a bit watery and lacking in Mexican flavor, and short on quac, but still basically acceptable. And the onion rings were perfect. On the whole, the best meal I had in Shanghai.

Next stop: the Shanghai Ancient Sex Museum, which I'd seen leafing through the guidebook in the bookstore. Following Billy's map markings and the guidebook's address (479 Nanjing Lu, 8th floor), I found the right building fairly quickly. But a complete circuit of the ground floor, where Billy remembered it to be, found no Sex Museum. I decided to ignore Billy's advice and headed up to the eighth floor, as per the guidebook. No Museum, just a restaurant and a cheerful uniformed young lady who asked if I wanted a massage. I asked for the museum, and, after consultation with the desk girl, they pointed me to the Shanghai museum. The only way I could think to be more specific was to spell out the word sex on my electronic dictionary, and I wasn't comfortable with that approach, so I retreated to the ground floor.

I circeld the building again, and found a side staircase. The second floor landing featured a couple necking, but the rest of the ascent uncovered only restaurants and closed doors. When I hit the roof I gave up and turned around. On the descent, the couple on the second floor was still necking.

The last stop was the Carrefour gracery store near Billy's. His map directions were more successful here, and I spent at least an hour dazed by the Target retail experience that is Carrefours. Broad aisles, clearly marked prices, a complete absence of intrusive clerks eager to snatch away the merchandise you are fondling and replace it with silly little tickets ... bliss. But I forgot to look for Vegemite, requested by the Australian teachers in Guilin.

And now, after a quick noodle run with Des, who's off to Pudong airport to pick up Xiao Hong, I find myself sitting on the train with what seem to be perfect bunkmates - polite, friendly, and happy to ignore me while I type. I should have bought a full bunch of bananas in the station (they were so yellow and so not rotten - I got three) so I could share. Ah well.

Time to pick up Paradiso and figure out if I fell asleep in the second Canto or the Third last night.

The train ride back to Guilin was much more peaceful - no pesky annoying woman trying to colonize my bunk; quiet, as the train DJ seemingly slept in until late morning instead of waking us all up with "wake-up music" at 6:30. I read "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times; I can sum it up with "Friedman is a tool," and have additional details forthcoming.

I left my wallet and palmpilot in the little fold-down webbing by my middle-level bunk. Until, as I was sitting reading a few yards down the corridor, a train cop handed them to me. Then I kept them in my pockets.

We pulled into Guilin a few hours after sunset, and I trudged through the gauntlet ("Hel-lo!" "Taxi!") to the bus stop. The number ten pulled in soon enough, and we more or less lined up. As I was about to board, a woman in a bright yellow shirt scooted up from the other end of the bus stop and tried to insert herself in line. Tired or not, my reflexes were ready, and I gave her quite a bodyblock. This somehow put me in front of the person who had been ahead of me, and he was ready to yield up his spot to the crazy foreigner, but I stepped back and insisted he go first. The displaced queue-jumped gave me a very dirty look, but I massed double what she did, plus the backpack, and could have cared less.

So, a very successful, very fun trip to Shanghai. The only thing thing I left behind was a little travel towel I had bought for the occasion. Billy, please consider that blue mini-towel yours if you want it. Otherwise, I guess it's Bebe's new chew-toy.

Weeks later, I realized that I probably left one of my two coolmax high-tech white socks. What's really neat about them is that they dry very quickly, making them ideal travel socks. But now I only have one. Alas and a alack, but a fair price to pay for a good holiday.