To pick up from where I left off, the train was incredible. I went in with an open mind, but I certainly wasn't expecting that kind of luxury!! Think lacy gently wafting curtains and individual tv screens...wow. It turns out that they shuffled rooms around because they don't like people having a quad room to themselves, so I ended up bunking with a really great swiss guy, George and a Spanish guy, Luis. We spent a ton of time comparing who things are in our parts of the world, and how we have found china to be thus far. I sent them off with the suggestion of finding xiao lun bao in Shanghai, as both of them had been fairly unimpressed with chinese food thus far, sad times.

Shanghai itself is an interesting city. I got to see it from two polar opposites. The first day I found a tiny ship themed hostel right by the Bund. This hostel was hilarious. The front desk was covered with massive ropes ties in sailing knots, and the dorm beds I stayed in looked like ship bunks, complete with portholes. It was pretty goofy. The first day there I walked along the Bund, a stretch of buildings along the HuangPu river that divides Shanghai in half. The side of the Bund I was on is the old side, colonial buildings that go back to the turn of the century and which used to be the british and american embassies in Shanghai. At the moment the entire city and especially the Bund is  one big construction site, as Shanghai is slated to host the world Expo in 2010. If you look across the rover, you can see Pudong, a skyline of highrises, all of which have been built within the last 20 years, most of them in the last 5. When I post pictures of this skyline you'll understand the jaw-dropping insanity of this fact. The skyline is packed. It's shiny. It's huge. And it's all younger than I am. Younger than Avary! It's just insane the rate at which this country is expanding. 

After wandering along the riverside I took Sean's advise and went down the Bund Sightseeing tunnel, which has very little to do with sightseeing but a whole lot to do with flashing lights and goofy voice-overs. You enter a little plexiglass buggy that looks as though it belongs in Disneyland and it takes you down a tunnel with spiraling LEDs lighting up the darkness around you. As you go along the tunnel the colors and designs of the lights change as the voice overs inform you that you are entering through "meteorites...nascent lava....paradise and hell" It is just too cheezeball-wonderful for words. This tunnel runs beneath the river and takes out out into the midst of these silly looking buildings, including the Pearl, a giant tripod topped with a ball hovering over two domes and a museum that gives the whole thing the appearance of a colossal penis watching over Shanghai. It's just so goofy and wonderful.

I am now completely starving, so I'm going to go out and explore Wuhan and grab some niuromien, but I'll catch up on the posting soon, promise :)