Shanghai nights

I am one of those people who takes a sick pleasure in visiting a loo marked "Please put no paper in toilet, it will brake the toilet!! Please put toiletpaper in bin!!" and then see a big ball of toiletpaper getting flushed dow the drain. This has caused me all kinds of problems here in China.

We've moved on down to Shanghai. We met alot of cool people during our time in Beijing and we decided to join some of them on their way south. Shanghai, -at first glance seems alot cleaner than Beijing. Both the streets and air is nicer and people seem to spit less. This makes me happy. We've found a sweet small veggie-place that serves fake meet accompanied with amusing translations. Some of my favs are "Keeping the baby" and "Delicious roasted husband". Today we had Tiger-skin rolls, hopefully the veggie-version. Vegetarian eating can be hard here, but we've learned to look for the buddhist places, since they normally follow a vegetarian diet. Drinking, which seemed so easy concidering a pint is about 3 NOK a piece, is turning out to be harder than expected. The local beer is thinner than water and ten times more lactating. It's a stuggle not breaking the seal during the first bottle.

Shanghai is located by the coast, so they have alot of fish-restaurants. Everytime i pass one, my heart breaks a little whe i discover that it's not in fact, a petshop selling turtles, but a delicacy waiting to happend. We even saw some seatortoises trough one of the windows. Now who fancies endangered species on their plate? (and yes, I'm still norwegian, and no, I don't eat whale-meat)

We just moved to our second Shanghai-location, still in a room witout a window, and with a bed covering the whole bedroom. Super-sweet, and pink too. But i actually quite like it. The hostel's worse though, no smoking in the bar, and awful music. It'll grow on us, I hope, and if not, hey, we could always do a few nights in Xi-an on our way back north.

Nine million..

dams of spit in Beijing

So. Beijing. People here spit everywhere. And not in a quiet, more decadent way. They hark it up with a sound of death and slag it out randomly around them. Stinky, slimey, slippery spit. It could hit you at any time, you never know from which direction.

Apart from that, it's all good. People are friendly, things are cheap, we're making friends and watching attractions. And when we go shopping, eating or anywhere that requires the service of an employee, we get our own private stalker with no sense of personal space. I still haven't figured out if that's what they concider good service, or if they think we're planning to steal something. Welcome to China.

On the road again

I'm taking off again. China, to be more spesific. It's been a wild semester, as usual, and I've been useless, as usual, but it's great to actually not be sick anymore. I'm getting slowly better and it's all good and dandy.

Spending tomorrow in Oslo to fix our visas and hook up with old friends before stopping in Amsterdam on our way to Beijing. And we're staying a month, man couldn't leave the job behind for longer than that, but it's something, and it will be refreshing and sobering and insha allah humbeling, because I've been flying a bit too high lately, and we need to find some common ground. We're trying to find an orphenage to volunteer at.

My only petty problem now is a friend who thinks I'm the one and not being packed yet. But me being late sort of goes with the territory, so it's all hunky dory.