Santi - 8/27/2007 - First week in Shanghai, China

If you got the shadow, play this song as you read this, it's been on my mind as I've planned out this email [DJ Shadow - You Can't Go Home Again]

I am walking home at around 13:30 from the first night of revelry. The subway is simple enough but its 4 Kuai a pop and I've got 1.50 to my name (story of my life). It's good to leave the heavy tourist roads and away from people’s square where old men ask you to be their friends and take them out for drinks. I assume shanghai is manageable and that my map is accurate but actually there are about 13 roads between each avenue not marked on it. It begins. As the tourist fade the translated street signs do as well, and I slowly but surely come to the realization that I am fucked, north is south and I am running on one bottle of water, the only thing I could afford at the time. Fuck it, the best way to get to know a city is by getting lost, n'est pas? So I take it through the dodgy ass (and ergo most intriguing) alleyways until I can find the larger arteries that might hopefully be on my counterfeit map.

If you ever got a headache from the black exhaust fumes and filth in Guatemala then get ready for migraine capital because the city smells of cholera, Greek for diarrhea? Latin maybe? But worse than feces on the ground is the rancid ass fried tofu, a whiff of which is pure hell. They appropriately call it stinky tofu and apparently when it is stinky enough it’s quite nice. I marvel at the sites and suddenly find myself walking into a Latin-American forest, gorgeous bonsai trees engulfed by very lush plants, all towering above me. This is the kind of alley I like, but what’s crazy is I am also enveloped by the nocturnal orchestra of myriad crickets, except it’s not night, and it’s not the rainforest under the full moon at the end of haphazard torrential rains. This urban jungle reveals to me instead a very dodgy animal market, with everything from octopus to gargantuan scorpions, and the cutest parrots and puppies... on second thought; it might have been a deli because I’ve definitely seen all of the above on a stick. Wonderful. But let’s take it back a notch.

I have a haiku, but I am not sure if the appropriate structure is 5-7-5 or 7-5-7. For the sake of my creative genius, we'll make this one a 5-7-7.

Haiku to my crocs

long-walks-you're-cum-fy
but-then-poo-wa-ter-gets-in
so-now-i-stopped-wea-ring-them


So I meet a south African the previous day [so everything is 'brilliant' and 'quite nice'] and we agree to meet up at captain's hostel for drinks and a bomb view of the city (Fuzhou Rd - a bit pricy), we run into a couple of Utahns who agree to follow up with some grub. A girl tags along in the elevator and we are off to becoming surgeons. Clear gloves, out comes a plate of maybe 25 or 30 baby lobsters or crayfish maybe to dissect and put in our mouths, the poor Utahns are vegans (although not Mormon, so I guess God does only punish once)... it turns out the girl that came along is from Guate and was at all the sport tournaments I was at until '03. The world is too small. Cheap food and then the boardwalk, fantastic place to drink cheap and, well it’s a boardwalk but Chinese, until the skyline turns off at 11pm to save light. Then all is dark, and my mistake not to check the subway lines, so everyone leaves and thank God the South African is quite nice and lets me crash on his hostel roof, which he found a ladder to. I wake up circa noon and I have no idea where I am and its hot... very hot, and humid, hangover hot and humid, and where THE FUCK AM I.

So finally after many conversations that went like:

Me: wo mey loo la.
Arbitrary chinese woman: lao wai!
Me: lao wai?
A.C.W: hihihi laowai.
Me: wo mey loo la!
A.C.W: wo mee loo le?

etcetera etcetera I ask a question and they answer in Chinese, which makes it hell’uv hard to understand because I don’t speak Chinese but what are they gonna do, and the sky is hot and I drank like 8 or nine last night which does not equivalate to 1 bottle of now lukewarm water like the croc water.

Finally! I start to see more and more barbershops which abound in my neighborhood, the only problem is a lot of them don’t have any scissors or chairs, or people who cut hair, but they do have many Chinese woman sitting on couches waiting to prostitute themselves. Definitely not hairdressers some. At last I made it home after 2 and half hours on the streets. alone, locked up in my hotel room with the ac blasting and the fantastic beat of the aforementioned song that id had in my head all day.... I deprived myself of shanghai for some 16 hours, and as such thoroughly experienced china.

Warmth,

Santi