Settling into a routine

So am I a resident of this city now? Going to work the past couple of days I've fallen in sync with the natural rhythms of the city - milling with the crowd in the morning, sidestepping the buses at the intersection. Shanghai, by the way, trumps New York in terms of crazy drivers and requires both a keen eye and huge balls in order to make it across the street alive.



Also, how come no one told me that there is a http://www.shanghaiist.com/?

Apparently Ed Norton is in town with Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber. My goal is to find them somehow during that National Day holiday and buddy up to them. John Zhu International Man of Being Ed Norton's Buddy.

Also, according to Shanghaiist, roughly 84 million people will be flooding into Shanghai this week. So that's close to 1/5th of the entire population of the United States coming into the one city I am staying in. Should make for some good times.

The digital city mall where my hotel recommended I go to look for an international cell-phone. It was a gadget lovers dream mall. I ended up just getting a chinese SIM card since I realized my mpx220 is a quad band phone. Wanna reach me in Shanghai? Call this insanely long string of numbers! (86 21) 13122098071


I stopped in this place called the "Members Lounge" to grab some food. Inside, for the first time, I heard strangers speaking cantonese. This dish was supposed to be "Spaghetti" with spicy mushrooms. As you can see, it's really just ramen.


boring. but i finally got an office.


looking out the window from the cafe where i was having lunch.


At first, I though these white nubbins on my table were antacid tablets put out for the taking. turns out, they were buttons to signal the waiters. Ingenius.


This picture is awfully dark, but its of a kid waiting for the bus with his mom. He's wearing some sort of inflatable headware they were selling all over the streets. I was tempted to buy one, but thought better of it.


More wandering. The sign is for some seafood restaurant. The tangle of wires are the overhead powerlines which power and guide the city buses.


After wandering down some side streets, I came across this. Turns out there was a card game going on. Everything you would expect from a scene like this was present - plenty of cigarette smoke, yelling and back slapping, loads of RMB laid out on the table, weathered leathery faces of the men playing, and yes, a switchblade out on the table.


This park was bathed internally entirely by green light. When something is bathed entirely in green light, one must investigate.


After navigating through some paths, my ears perked and picked up the strains of some chinese old timey pop song. It led me here where a bunch of people were doing ballroom dancing moves in an open area of the park. It's dark, but you can make out some outlines of people. Not sure if you can tell, but there was a lady in the back left excercising on one of those gazelle (or is antelope?) things that tony little sells on infomercials. it's the machine where you stand and run in place. surreal. i left after that.


lots and lots and lots of my former countrymen.


exhausted after wading through all the human carnage, i told myself i deserved a treat. hui lau shan seems to be some sort of chain of sweet shops. this is some type of "mango extreme" dish. mango pudding, with mango chunks, on top of mango gelatin, with a mango ice ball on top. was great.


i got hit in the head so many times from these damn inflatable hammers. so annoying.