Shanghai in Review

I am writing this at the airport as I wait to fly out to Hong Kong. I had a really great time in Shanghai - mostly thanks to the attention of our coworkers. :)


China really impressed me. The whole PuDong side of Shanghai is new and pretty nice and well kept. There are some older parts of Shanghai that are more Gerard-Street ish, but overall they sure do make an effort. I had sort of expected the area near work to be sort of ghetto, since I knew it was in the sticks (a la my visit to Mumbai) - but nope, it is very very nice.

Shanghai kind of reminds me of a cross between Tel Aviv and Las Vegas and Silicon Valley - hahahaha.

And the bathrooms (except for one at that village with the river - it was an Indian-style hole in the wall kind, which in and of itself isn't such a big deal, but this one was sorta dirty, and it also had the problem of being near a stinky tofu stand) have all been clean and stocked. To me this indicates a pretty high level of sophisication. Like, no one seems to pee on the seat. Genius! At work it seemed like they were being almost continuously cleaned - in Markham they are cleaned pretty often too, but I think the Shanghai office edges it out, slightly. Although no automatic toliet flush here, since all the toliets have the #1/#2 option.
I will likely not be posting as frequently for the next phase of the trip, I don't know how often we'll be around Internet connections and such.

Update:  I'm in HK, but we're super busy - I will try and post later tonight!  Macau today!  :)