yellow fever: THE SHANG

21:34BST 7/28/08
SHANGHAI

throughout the planning and execution of this trip, ive told myself that i have 21 days in china. i left on the 7th and i pretty much thought that i was coming back on the 28th. so as i began to type up this post and noticed that today was the 28th, i about had a heart attack. literally, i wasn sitting in mike's living room, face red, heart pumping, blood leaving face-type worried. im really glad that i was mistaken :).

today was awesome!! i slept in, had my first hot shower since... since.... a long time ago, and hit the town with my awesome friend mike. we went to a japanese conveyer belt sushi place (ill let you think about that one), took the subway to the peoples square, went to a museum with this accurate replica of the inner circle of the city, bought fake gucci glasses at an underground store, saw the bundt, BUSTED MY ASS SO HARD (why is there so much marble in china?!), took the "sight seeing tunnel" to pudong (the east side of the city), got lost, made out with jackie chan, went up to the 88th floor of the jin mao building, had the most amazing grapefruit-pineapple juice, stole a seat from a man on the subway, got the craziest massage of my life, and ate the most delicious taiwanese food over great convo with mike gen ta de muqin (w/ his mom). pretty crazy day. ill elaborate.

first, the bust ass. we were walking up thiese stairs and there was the most random patch of marble (literally, like a 4 inch stip that spanned the beginning of the stair case) that was the littlest bit damp and i busted ass. really and truly. i fell into a dirty puddle, i was wet and dirty, and i hurt my knee pretty bad. as the day went on, it hurt more and more. im almost afraid to go to bed because i know that when i wake up, after not sleeping for awhile, i wont be able to move around very well at all. whatever. we were supposed to go out tonight and we had to cancel it bc it would have been too prohibitive.

second - the massage. o.m.g. that was straight up violent. like, seriously and truly, straight up violent. the girl beat the crap out of me, and though she understood 'tai jiang!' (too hard), she didnt really let up at all. then she packed on a thick layer of ground up ginger, covered it in hot towels and wrapped me up for a half an hour. IT BURNED! it burned so hard, it was hotter than sitting in the volcano of the hot spring. but like, in what massage parlor in america will a missuse literally hit your spine over and over again?! i think im going to have two big welts on my thoracic vertebrae. :(. it was different though..

third - the taiwanese food was AWESOME! like, chinese food uses a lot of fei rou he qi you (fat and oil) all around its delicious delicious vegetables. taiwanese food, from what i can tell, has all the awesome food, but with less fat. i like. not only that, but mikes mom doesnt reeeeally speak english but seems to understand a lot. so she insisted that we would play chinese lesson at dinner and after. i was more than happy to play along. she would ask me a question that i should be able to answer, teach me the main word if i didnt know it, and then would repeat my answer with the correct grammar afterwards. i was able to take some notes later on, i feel like i really learned a lot.

to keep things interesting, im posting some pix to give you a better idea of what was up. enjoy!