To the road...

As I write this I am less than 12 hours from getting on a plane out of Shanghai without knowing when or if I will return to this city. It's been a fascinating interesting experience, you might even call it life changing. The past two weeks have been understandably busy, scurrying around to ship off all my things and say goodbye to friends before I leave. This end, like most, is bittersweet; As excited as I am to travel, and as excited as I am to leave, departing a place where friends have been made and an enjoyable life lived always has a twinge of sadness. Because I've been busy I haven't been able to write everything I wanted to write in here the past few weeks, so I'm going to hit you with some quick hit paragraphs about Shanghai.

This city can be beautiful. Who knew?! At the City Urban Planning Museum they showed a map of the downtown and had all the parks and streets lined with trees and flowers highlighted in green, which stunningly displayed how much of this city has greenery if you care to see it. Now that the usual grey has abated for the past two weeks and the sky is blue, everything seems greener and more natural.

And Shanghai isn't taking this beautification lying down either, hoards or workers and public works projects are making this drab grey city more and more vibrant by the day. A block from my house an old decayed street was redone with more trees, more flowers and a new paint job that took the street from depressing to leisurely in a few weeks. Elsewhere in the city paint on the old grey block houses gives them a lighter presence, casting the mind back not to the communist era, but before that when Shanghai was really coming into its own. Perhaps in a few years the city will complete its transformation, which I no doubt will return to see.

The Shanghainese can learn, and learn fast. The World Expo is coming and Shanghai needs to be ready for it's big debut. As a result there have been posters, fliers, people with microphones urging pedestrians on the escalator to... Stand on the Right, Walk on the Left. You may recall I railed against the Chinese inability to grasp this concept, which I suspected at the time was because nobody had ever told them to. Turns out I was right, and all they needed was a massive government campaign to tell the people what to do and think, and compliance has been exceedingly swift! Westernization here they come!

Unfortunately the Expo brings other problems for the expats living in Shanghai. The government here has already unrolled a campaign of advertisements which will run nearly 24/7 on every available viewing screen proclaiming this upcoming expo as the seminal pinnacle of human creation for all of history. I'm not kidding, May 1 marked the '365 days until' point and the ads ratcheted up from boiling to straight vaporization. Thankfully I'm leaving and I'll never need to gaze into the happy eyes of the large 'toothpaste-looking' mascot ever again. The rest of the expats remaining behind in Shanghai will no doubt have reoccurring nightmares about this creature and will need psychiatric care... Good luck to you all.

On an unrelated topic, I've realized China does a pretty good job at recycling. I don't know how accurate my last statement is, but my personal experience in the past week while trying to throw out all the junk I didn't want left me realizing how much other people in Shanghai wanted my junk! Now, I've experienced the strange bottle recycling phenomenon before. Every city has recycling and every city has can and bottle people, but rarely are these can and bottle people seemingly homeowners with leisure time to play majong. Whenever I try to bring my empty bottles to the trash cove in my building complex, I make it halfway there before some old man comes running up to me to take the bottles from me, which wouldn't surprise me half as much if he hadn't been relaxing in our guarded compound playing majong with his buddies. I don't even know where the recycling place is near my house, but he does and I know how to find him, which is all that matters. Also, as I was Cleaning my room, I had loads to throw away, the useless junk I'd collected but had no intention of paying good money to send home, every trip I made to the dumpster full of bags had been seized by curious collectors before I returned with the next load 5 minutes later. Somewhere in Shanghai people are enjoying baggy sweaters, extra reading lamps and broken suitcases and I hope they enjoy them. Here's to you, Shanghai's secret recyelers!

Finally, as a last ditch 'Tourist in Shanghai' moment, I saw the Chinese Acrobats Show on Sunday night. Between the lady who balanced 20 water glasses on her chin before climbing a latter in high heels and the gentlemen who flipped off see-saws onto waiting chairs 30 feet above, I was most impressed by the one man who juggled a porcelain pot the size of a mid sized TV on his head. He would toss this massive pot in the air, catch it on his head, then tossed it from lip to lip on his head, all without dropping the thing which would have caused a massive headache, had it not crushed him completely. Nothing like a little good old fashioned tourist razzle dazzle.

And so, for the next 4+ months I expect nothing less than the usual tourist razzle dazzle. This isn't the end of the blog. Although I can't get Shanghaied in Shanghai anymore, I can still write about everything I see in South East Asia and beyond. I'll write soon.