That’s the metaphor for today. Shanghai is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. You can get lost in it, wander around stumbling across amazing places, and never see the same thing twice. The proprietor’s motives and personality are uncertain, and seem composed of equal parts frenzy, creativity, callousness and unpredictability. The metro is the glass elevator.
One day it’s a room with a hundred trained squirrels shelling walnuts, the next it’s dragon boat races and crowds tossing leaf-wrapped rice dumplings into the water. Down this hall there’s a passel of Mormons homeschooling their kids in the park; down that chute, a lady selling a thousand crickets in little wicker baskets. Zig this way and you’re on the fastest train in the world. Zig that way and you’re in the middle of a giant kite flying festival.
You can sample gourmet Japanese sweets, dry-fried Sichuan green beans with peppercorns that numb your lips, German microbrews, glazed Chinese chicken feet, dumplings filled ingeniously with soup that spills down your chin when you bite into them, green tea flavored Oreos, abalone and sea horses, Indian dal and pickled mango as good as any you’d find in Delhi, sacks of bleeding yum berries and hairy lychee fruit, and the KFC spicy triple chicken burger.
You could spend years on the metro, exploring, and every time you came to the top of the escalator you’d find something different and new to explore. Could be the ocean, a farm, an IMAX theater, a back alley phantasmagorium, a wet market, an endless sea of identical apartment buildings, an underground flea market, a British soccer (sorry, football) pub, a factory making iPads, a wasteland of concrete rubble flecked randomly with tiny, well-ordered garden plots, an orphanage for kids with cleft palates, a trendy bar that used to be an early meeting place for Mao Zedong and the Communist party.
In a few days, we are heading back to Vermont for 3 weeks of rest and vacation and hanging with friends. It will be weird to slip out of this carnival freak show and back into the more measured, idyllic rhythm of summer in New England. Nice, great, but weird.
And we will come back here. If you read my last post, you might think that we are just miserable and crazy in Shangai, and on off days we may feel that way. But it’s fascinating too, and we are pushing our limits and finding that we are able, happily, to move beyond them. That’s a lesson worth learning, as even Naomi and Townes would tell you.
In Chinese, the United States is called ma guo, which means “beautiful land.” We are looking forward to getting back to it for a spell. See you there.
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| Matthew and Allison on a rare date (thanks Elaine!), eating the best Vietnamese food I've ever had. |
One day it’s a room with a hundred trained squirrels shelling walnuts, the next it’s dragon boat races and crowds tossing leaf-wrapped rice dumplings into the water. Down this hall there’s a passel of Mormons homeschooling their kids in the park; down that chute, a lady selling a thousand crickets in little wicker baskets. Zig this way and you’re on the fastest train in the world. Zig that way and you’re in the middle of a giant kite flying festival.
You can sample gourmet Japanese sweets, dry-fried Sichuan green beans with peppercorns that numb your lips, German microbrews, glazed Chinese chicken feet, dumplings filled ingeniously with soup that spills down your chin when you bite into them, green tea flavored Oreos, abalone and sea horses, Indian dal and pickled mango as good as any you’d find in Delhi, sacks of bleeding yum berries and hairy lychee fruit, and the KFC spicy triple chicken burger.
You could spend years on the metro, exploring, and every time you came to the top of the escalator you’d find something different and new to explore. Could be the ocean, a farm, an IMAX theater, a back alley phantasmagorium, a wet market, an endless sea of identical apartment buildings, an underground flea market, a British soccer (sorry, football) pub, a factory making iPads, a wasteland of concrete rubble flecked randomly with tiny, well-ordered garden plots, an orphanage for kids with cleft palates, a trendy bar that used to be an early meeting place for Mao Zedong and the Communist party.
In a few days, we are heading back to Vermont for 3 weeks of rest and vacation and hanging with friends. It will be weird to slip out of this carnival freak show and back into the more measured, idyllic rhythm of summer in New England. Nice, great, but weird.
And we will come back here. If you read my last post, you might think that we are just miserable and crazy in Shangai, and on off days we may feel that way. But it’s fascinating too, and we are pushing our limits and finding that we are able, happily, to move beyond them. That’s a lesson worth learning, as even Naomi and Townes would tell you.
In Chinese, the United States is called ma guo, which means “beautiful land.” We are looking forward to getting back to it for a spell. See you there.
When we visit you can have another date night!
ReplyDelete100 trained squirrels shelling walnuts?? Seriously? I wanna see that!
ReplyDeleteI have a 9 yr old who is ecstatically happy because he just found out Townes will be in Vt tomorrow! You all have been missed greatly! Safe travels my friends!
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