"If God allows Shanghai to endure, he will owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology."

 

I like it here.

 

We did not eat all morning, but hunger keens the senses. All day raining. Metro to People's Square and the shopping promenade stretching from there to the Bund. The Expo mascot in every window and most shopping bags. Men carrying bags of cactus whispering "hashish marijuana" and miniskirt girls:"hello I like you Let's go" as soon as the rain lets up for a minute.

 

A young businessman - like us, from California - bought us lunch in a cafe bar. An enviable life of living in capital cities around the world. "It seems like a jetsetter life, but really it's hard work, going all over like that." I nodded. I was skeptical, but kept it to myself. If someone buying you lunch wants you to believe their life is more burdensome than it seems, it seems ungrateful not to at least nod. He seemed interested in our trip to India, and so I told him a little about it, but, I think, he meant it in a different way and grew a little bored, so I stopped talking and we resumed asking him questions about himself. I asked him about his Chinese girlfriend. Daniel asked him what he missed about California. I asked him about his job. The manner in which a person answers questions like this is vastly more educational than the answers themselves. He signed the bill and returned to work and we finished our coffee and tea and went back out to wander around, much refreshed. We agreed, he was a very nice guy. And it is very, very satisfying to have your lunch paid for by someone who seems to have gotten his fair share of free lunches.

 

No one made a dollar they didn't earn unless someone worked for a dollar they didnt get. I think Big Bill Hayward said that.

 

We wandered past the Bund until we hadn't seen another Western tourist for some time, then down the first alley we saw that seemed to have venders and carts and foodstalls. It was one and a half men wide.

 

The buildings in places like that are edifices piled upon edifices, like the dark brain of Piranesi. ten broken cisterns in a row, lightning bolts of moss holding them together like rotten living mortar, each tub full of a different amount of the only perfectly clear water I've seen in a week. Half-bicycles turned upside-down everywhere. A leather man wearing clothes as an afterthought, in the shadow of the dangerously drooping concrete underhang of a second storey assembled, as though in a silently and frantically criminal single night of sorcerous construction, on the sinking unfortunate first floor upon whose back additional levels were already being devised in the secret mind of the living alley. The archecture is feverish and desperate. The use concrete with an ingenuity and irreverence that is without precedent in my experience, like a universal adhesive. Innumerable clotheslines buttress  each residence to another. Storefronts are erected in front of and upon others, until each shop has strange paired specialties, such as top-of-the-line stovetop ranges and baby clothes, cigarette cartons and moped wheels. Plastic tubs, police caps, toilet seats, a cosmetologist, bike repair, all of them without custom, every proprietor and employee of which is sitting on tin canvas stools with their shirts undone playing chess or shouting and smoking. 

 

One can peer over window boxes into the second storey of most tiny apartments from my height, and stairs carved out of the cobblestones lead into the only-recently subterranean entrances to the first floor homes.

 

It isn't quite the golden age of opium gangsters that missionary I quoted at the beginning was referring to, but you can't have everything!

 

Regards from the Whore of the Orient!