shanghai-ed!

Not really, sorry for the duh title.

A bit tired from the 20h train trip here from hk so didn't do much today. Just walked east through people's park and various streets till I got to the Bund then walked back along Nanjing road. I like what I see so far. Train trip was good, the locals I met on board and in the rooms here are all very friendly and helpful. Also, I am better at reading chinese than i thought, have no problems getting around. They say my putonghua is good too, haha, maybe they're just being polite. But I cannot catch shanghainese. Should be going to YuYuan Gardens and the Old town tml.

The hostel is very nice, looks like a boutique hotel and they have real coffee, but food sucks.
It's 1 min walk from nanjing road and people's park and all the museums so for 55Y a dorm bed it's very good. doesn't seem much use for all the 1or 5 jiao notes so far. Books here are very cheap and good. and bookshops are really big. perfect weather in afternoon but gets more cold at night - i'm wearing t-shirt and 2 sweaters tonight.

The chanel exhibition on the last day in hk was good though. really good. Nice quotable lines, nice individual installations, good translations from point to point, thought-provoking, fantastic cntianer - alien organic landscapes!, fantastic voiceover - wonder if it's coco chanel's voice or zaha hadid's. really impressed.

oh! I had so much on my mind but somehow it all slips away..

Train trip: like taking a walk through the different industries. nice farmland and rivers, brick making factory with bricks laid out in the courtyard and the brick furnace looming over it all. science-fi like buildings in the middle of nowhere. A whole town with dutch styled houses that would not look out of places if you stick any of them in the middle of amsterdam. flowers. Guangzhou the big city. Super interesting architecture of the in-between. The fringe of the railway tracks. The way the railway officials' uniforms gett from immaculate in hk to messy in guangzhou to neat again in shanghai. Talking to different people on the train. eavesdropping on dissucssions on the train, trying to tune out shanghainese dialect on the train.

what else.. mind's a mess. nut at least I'm getting closer to getting my land legs back - things are not swaying so badly when i sit or slow down anymore. headache's better, or at least numbed by the cool air. Wished I could have gone along with the group os students/fresh grads from hubei/hebei but when i met them I was still carrying all my stuff trying to find the hostel. sigh.

okie, got people waiting, and the light here's not good for typring. ciao till tml =)