At long last, reunited with my beloved grandmother. Happy 100!
We are safely in Shanghai, after a (mostly) uneventful plane ride. I’ve learned several things since getting on that China-bound plane, and have decided to list them according to my stream of consciousness:
- My baby is not one of those that sleeps on planes. She’s one of those that poops on planes. This time, she pooped twice. Big, yucky, up-the-back poopies that took both her Mom and Dad to change. She slept only 1.5 hours out of the 12 hour long flight, and since she wanted only Mommy the whole way here, Mommy didn’t get any sleep at all, either.
- Shanghai is HOT HOT HOT. The heat envelops you immediately upon walking out of the airplane. We’re talking HOT. We’re talking HUMID. We’re talking, 5-MINUTES-AFTER-YOU-TAKE-A-SHOWER-YOU’RE-SWEATY-ENOUGH-TO-TAKE-ANOTHER-SHOWER. Well, one thing about the heat that is good: I’ve already lost a few pounds and can fit into a pair of pants I couldn’t fit into before I left.
- Homeopathy for jet lag really works! I popped a few JetZone Jet Lag prevention tablets on my way here and within 2 days, was free of any jet lag. I wasn’t really used to having so much energy in the middle of the day so early in a trip to Asia, and as a result, have spent much more money than I had intended to already (?!). Hmm, maybe they should mention that as a drawback of not being jet-lagged.
- I can’t live without Facebook. There is no Facebook in China. There is no YouTube in China either, for that matter. Why? They’re censored. When you try to go there, you wait so long that you eventually time out and get an error message. I think there are ways to get there through a proxy server, but I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do it. Plus, I don’t want to get any of my relatives in trouble, so I am going to have to do without. Which is not that easy, and has caused me to realize that I am addicted to Facebook after all!
- Shanghai is like New York City on ‘roids. Seriously, this place is big-time. I’ll bet the cost of living here is higher than in NYC. The subways are air-conditioned, for goodness’ sake. The same Metro card can be used to pay for a bus ride, taxi ride, and subway ride. There are skyscrapers in every direction, women dressed in designer fashions and high heels on their way to the grocery store, and Ferraris and Bentleys littering the roads.
- I love these $12.32 massages. There are spas and massage establishments everywhere. You can spit in any direction and hit one, and they’re open seemingly all hours, on all days. I’ve been getting massages every night for 78 RMB ($12.32, at today’s exchange rate) and enjoying the immediate tiredness that comes afterward, which makes for a peaceful night’s sleep. It’s awesome.
- I have more relatives than I can count. We celebrated my grandmother’s 100th birthday a few days ago, and relatives from all over China and Taiwan made the trip to her party. For a girl who grew up with only her nuclear family around her in the States, it was a pretty wonderful feeling to know that I do have as large a sprawl of relations as anybody else.
And tomorrow, it’s off to Beijing to visit old friends and historic sites. Great Wall, here we come!
