Leaving Shanghai

After an informative, action-packed, eye-opening and exhausting five day whirlwind tour of Shanghai, one that served as our introduction to China, today we left for Beijing. On the way, I had a little time to reflect on my travels. This is what I'm feeling:

- China is enormous.

- It's hard to communicate. You don't realize how far high school French gets you until you're in China and can't even tell when one word ends and another one begins.

- The people are nice, and everyone speaks a few words of English. Also, they throw out a lot of "uncles," "brothers" and "moms". Hearing a Chinese pearl seller call my mother "Mom" in the middle of heated negotiations always makes me smile.

- The food isn't THAT weird. Sure, you get sick of Chinese food, but not sick from it and a lot of it is very familiar, even unremarkable. The menus are huge, and if you just wanted to eat wonton soup, kung pao chicken and fried rice, you could do it no problem.

- Traveling with my mother is lovely, hilarious, frustrating, exhausting and, on the whole, very pleasant.

- Even with the aid of powerful pharmaceuticals, the jet lag messes you up for days. Like five or six. Worse, the effects are unpredictable. Some days I've been passing out at 8 PM, some days I am waking up at 3 AM, unable to fall asleep (at least, not without help).

- People are not as universally short as I expected. Or, more to the point, goddamit, I'm even short in China.

- It is so crowded. If I was even a little claustrophobic, it'd be lights out. Every tourist site we've been to has been jammed with people.

- Chinese people are terrible at being in lines. They won't mow you down outright, but they'll throw down a swim move, change their levels, use their children to break trail, wiggle, shimmy, hustle and plain old push to get by you. This becomes a more significant issue when a line of 1000 people all pulls the same moves, trying to get through some temple gate. After a trial by fire, I'm getting pretty ruthless.

- Chinese kids wear split pants, so their butts hang out and they just do their business wherever. This is half-hysterical and half-gross.



- Being white is still novel enough that, even in big cities, people want to take their picture with you. I think this is hilarious and I say yes every time. I am going to start demanding that they take one with my camera too -- I it'd make quite a photo album.

- There aren't any black people. For those that used to play the license plate game as children, seeing a black person in China is like checking off Guam.

- I really like it here.