Baghdad, China

Don't ever go to Shanghai.  

If you can help it, avoid Shanghai at all costs.  It's dirty, smelly, and full of fake Rolex salesmen.  

...

Perhaps I'm over-generalizing.  It's true, Shanghai does have its enjoyable sections of town, which I will describe later.  For the most part, however, Shanghai consists of smelly blocks of run down buildings, inhabited by questionable retailers and "massage" parlors; I will let you drawn your own conclusions about the latter.

We stayed in the Astor House Hotel, a historic building that has been privy to some of the most monumental events in Chinese history; the first stock exchange, filament-based lightbulb, and visits by President Grant and Albert Einstein.  Unfortunately, while the hotel itself was preserved as the luxary resort it always was, the area around the Astor House slowly degenerated into a slummish hellhole akin to the worst of war-torn Iraq.  In fact, the area around our hotel was dubbed "Little Baghdad" by several in our group, and rightfully so; two blocks south was an area of rubble that looked like it was just thrashed by a few of Tony Stark's Jericho missiles (props to those who understood that film reference).

But I digress, my hated of Shanghai was diluted somewhat by our venture to the French Concession, a section of town that looked strangely like Portland, especially given the light rain that coated the road in that sheen that I'm so familiar with.  We ventured to the Chinese Communist Propaganda Museum, which was essentially a collection of illegal works of art produced by Chainman Mao's propaganda campaigns all housed in the basement of an apartment building; sketchy and illegal, yes, but oh so worth it.

Shanghai, I also found out, is home to an absolutely homicidal scooter population.  As well a buses, and taxis, and even bicycles.  They all pay completely no heed to red lights, yields, or lanes in general.  It is chaos.  Madness.  A undulating mass of zig-zagging mahem.  Anarchy in practice.  Crossing the street requires a conscience dismissal of any and all road-crossing-etiquette that one learned in elementary school.  Puerto Rico looks like a drivers education class after this experience.  

My final night in Shanghai was an enjoyable one.  I ate at a fantastic restaurant (Ajisen), explored the taxi system (which will require a blog entry all its own), and discovered the municipal sytem of Shanghai is in desperate need of renovation: apparently it is common practice to leave wet cement on high-traffic sidewalks with no notification or warnings; there is one streetcorner of Shanghai that has my (accidental) footprint and (intentional) initials engraved into it.  

All in all, I am happy to be out of Shanghai.  Although we were in a poor area of town, I was not impressed with the city in general, and am excited to experience Beijing.  I still have a lot of talk about in regards to Shanghai, so I may write another entry tomorrow morning (free internet at this hotel....finally!).  

Peace out homies, I miss you all,

-- McG 

p.s. --- Apparently China missed the memo that pull tabs on soda cans are SO ten years ago.  Literally every Coke or Pepsi has pull tabs that require me to throw away two separate pieces of trash instead of one.  This is truly a mystery to me.