srah blah blah

Y'all way past the beauty sleep thing, trust me.

Today's China update:

• I saw my first squat toilet in China! Fortunately, I checked the next stall over and that had the other kind of toilet, so I was spared from having to use it. Bringing tissues and hand sanitizer was handy, though, as there was no TP or soap.
• I've refined my answer to "is there anything you don't eat" to "anything with the eyes still on it" and "anything that's still alive". Still haven't been confronted with these yet, but that's because I tell people up front. The little kid next to me at lunch was eating a crispy duck whose face was angled towards me. I don't think it's so much that I'm disturbed by food with the head still on, as that I don't have a lot of exposure and I don't really know how to approach it. Where do you start when you get a whole animal delivered to you? Do I have to eat the eyes? I will not eat the eyes.
• I actually sat down to eat dinner for the first time since I've been here and didn't have to eat dinner alone. I was perusing/shopping at the Super Brand Mall in Pudong and then got up the nerve to sit and eat alone, so I stopped into a Japanese ramen restaurant. When they finally got around to seating the white guy in front of me, they thought we were together, so we decided to sit together (and had to do a lot of miming to the waiter to tell him that we wanted separate checks). He just graduated from Oxford with a degree in Physics (!) and had traveled from England to Shanghai by train as a sort of grand tour before starting work in the real world. Apparently it took 9 hours (with customs/immigration/police, etc) for his train to cross the Kazakh/China border. We bemoaned our inability to drink milk in our tea (although I think this is overblown, because the melamine was only added to powdered milk to bulk it up, not to the fresh stuff where you would kind of notice the weird plastic texture!).
• The mall was full of Japanese restaurants. I got the impression that the Japanese like to come over to Shanghai to do cheap shopping, sort of like Europeans coming over to New York for the good exchange rate. I bought some clothes, since I've sweat through almost everything I brought with me, and some souvenirs.
• Then I went up the Oriental Pearl Tower, carrying all my bags with me. I don't think I was very popular in the crowded elevator.
• Then I tried to hail a cab for about an hour. I got a lot of offers from non-professional taxi drivers (people with regular cars who offer to take you somewhere) and turned them down, and when a cab finally stopped for me, it was one of the red ones, which I have been warned about! I was so desperate that I took it, and it all turned out fine. Got back later than expected/desired, but I'm proud that I'm able to stay awake until 11!
• I think I'm getting a cold. I'm off to have some orange juice and green tea with breakfast! I think I've finally gotten the hang of the breakfast buffet (I'm not trying the to-go thing again) so I will probably have a little bit of the Chinese offerings as well as the American/English ones. Yellow cream bun and baked beans, anyone?

srah - Wednesday, 24 September 2008 - 7:51 PM
Tags: china, travel

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