Hu's on first

First stop, Shanghai, {known to local residents as "Hu"} which means "by the sea" or "above the sea" and is indeed a flat, marshy area surrounded and suffused by water. Wet is the operative word; the humidity is 83% today, there is a constant mist, and walking feels a little like wading in a warm bath. It rained on and off today, and I think I myself rained as well.

The most startling thing about Shanghai is that it's not that startling. So much of it feels like a Western city. It's so sleek, new and commercial that it puts a lot of the U.S. to shame. In what apparently is still a communist country there is entrepreneurship and advertising everywhere (even wrapped around the columns in the sleek new subway system). The hotel I'm staying in is 5-star, certainly far better than anything I've ever paid for and totally in line with where I stayed in Tokyo on my FMF trip, with a room packed with amenities I never knew I needed. (Actually, it is run by a Japanese company.) There are traffic-choked roads, Starbucks and KFCs, upscale European boutiques.

OK, ok, there are the quaint Oriental touches: little hidden alleyways that reveal courtyards; fleets of clunky looking bicycles with heavy duty baskets and fenders and not an inch of spandex or a single helmet to be seen; motorized scooters driven lazily by people smoking cigarettes or clutching umbrellas, shopping bags, or car parts; three wheeled delivery bikes (trikes?) stacked 6 or 7 feet high with boxes; men in A-shirts eating breakfast dumplings from plastic tables on the sidewalk; open air butchers and dumpling shops; a circle of older people doing tai chi on a street corner; laundry drying (!!) on hangers and hooks from every window; the occasional old-school peaked straw hat. We drove past blocks of quaint old-looking apartments and were told that they'd probably be demolished within a year. Everything seems slated to be redone here very soon, including the textile factory we visited today. No, there were no 12 year old girls chained to sewing machines, but we did sweat a lot. It was a factory that made cotton cloth on big machines that were very much like the ones I worked on at Kingston Knitting Mills in the summer of 1977 when I worked the night shift tending machines that knitted sweater material. It even smelled exactly the same! But I'm told this factory will be relocated to make way for more high rises, like just about everything else in Shanghai.

The food is amazing and cheap. Which reminds me--it's time to go to dinner.