Andy Roddick bounced in the first round of the U.S. Open in 3 straight tiebreak sets
Where is Andy's mojo indeed?
New York vs. San Francisco
Written with tongue-in-cheek, but humorous reading for anyone who's lived in both cities before.
The first of a multi-part series on The Game, the thinking man's scavenger hunt
While living in Seattle, I heard so many stories about it from participants. Always wanted to play but never pulled a team together. It sounds awesome, though.
Laser-sighted slingshot
A video shows it splitting pencils. If only they had this when I was a kid.
A though experiment by George Saunders
"But dropping the idea that your actions are Evil, and that you are Monstrous, I enter a new moral space, in which the emphasis is on seeing with clarity, rather than judging; on acting in the most effective way (that is, the way that most radically and permanently protects my chickens), rather than on constructing and punishing a Monster."
The Evian Water Bra
Fill it with cold water to keep your breasts cool. Someone signed off on some Evian summer intern's project without reading the proposal.
The last time I was in Beijing, in 1994, buying knockoff goods was still felt like a dirty business. Silk Alley was a series of outdoor tents, and buying pirated CDs involved following merchants into back alleys or peering at goods in concealed drawers. Today, selling knockoffs is legitimate business, sold in plain view with a legitimacy that's almost brazen. On my return visit to Silk Alley, I barely recognized it. What once was a ramshackle tract of ragged tents is now a five or six story department store. The tents remain, but they're housed in an air conditioned building with escalators and a food court. Policeman roam the halls there, but only to provide security, not to arrest any sellers.
The range of knockoff goods there was amazing. Designer purses and wallets, from Louis Vuitton to Coach to Gucci to Prada. Mont Blanc pens. Oakley and Armani sunglasses. Sneakers from Nike to Adidas to everything in between (Mike and I ran across one unfortunately named brand of shoes - Dike; I don't think they were Nike knockoffs). Titleist and Callaway drivers and irons. Designer clothes from Ralph Lauren slacks to Zegna shirts to North Face jackets. Fake Rolexes, of course. I was shocked that some booths even sold knockoff iPods and Sony PSPs, with packaging that resembled the real thing.
It used to be that knockoff goods in China didn't dare to claim authenticity. They were like cover bands, announcing their imitation as a form of flattery. Instead of Polo, a knockoff's brand would be named Bolo, the horse rider in the stitched logo holding an unopened umbrella instead of a polo stick. Instead of Prada, you could purchase a Pradu. That's no longer the case. These knockoffs not only resemble the real thing, they use the actual brand names. Christina explained to me that her Balenciaga knockoff handbag had several features commonly used to identify the real McCoy, but I had never heard of Balenciaga, nor could I identify one if a woman smacked me in the face with one.
The quality of the knockoffs varied. The few athletic shoes I tried on felt like cardboard on my feet, despite their cosmetic resemblance to the real thing. The Oakley sunglasses knockoffs didn't use the same high quality frame material. The clothing quality was decent. The purses must have passed my sister and her friends' quality inspection, though, because they snapped up several. At $5 to $15 for a designer leather purse, I suppose one need not set the quality bar too high. Most everything seemed to sell for about a tenth to a quarter of what the real thing would cost, and sometimes less.
I'm not much of a shopper when I travel, so I was at best an amused observer. One good that did catch my interest, though, was one that didn't exist during my last visit to China in 1994: DVDs.
A friend of mine who moved to China told me that the first time he tried to purchase some DVDs a year or two ago, he was told to go to a particular street and wait for someone to solicit him. He went to that street and stood around for a long time, walking around, trying to look like an interested customer. He felt like a criminal, sulking about, but eventually someone approached him and led him to the backroom of a storefront to peruse the goods. Quite a few of the DVDs he purchased that day ended up being duds.
Nowadays, pirated DVDs, like other knockoffs in China, are sold in actual stores, with return policies, cash registers, and receipts. The first time I strolled into one and encountered shelf after shelf of product was a real eye-opener. The store clerk offered to play any DVDs I was interested in on a DVD and TV in the store, before I walked out with it. It's possible to find fairly high quality bootlegs of current movies. If it's shot in a movie theater, it's an empty one, without audience noise and the silhouette of someone walking to the bathroom crossing the screen. The DVD will come with an actual menu, though it may consist of nothing but a handful of chapter stops and a trailer ripped off of the Internet.
It's the DVDs of movies already out on DVD somewhere in the world that are the real eye-openers, though. These pirated copies are actual pressed copies of the real McCoy, so you get everything: special features, menus, subtitles and alternate audio tracks, anamorphic widescreen, the works. I saw dozens of Criterion Collection DVDs, obscure foreign titles, and complete seasons of nearly every television show from the United States in gigantic box set packaging.
From Beijing to Xian to Guangzhou to Shanghai, DVD prices ranged from $0.40 each to $1.25 each. China puts a cap on how many foreign (primarily American) movies can be shown on the big screen in China. This means most people in China, locals and expats alike, consume the bulk of American movies through these pirated DVDs. At those prices, however, I'm not sure many of those people would see the movies in theaters even if they did screen. Perhaps someday the Chinese government will take intellectual property rights seriously, but for now it's a free-for-all. The whole situation reminded me of the scene from The Untouchables, when Malone tells Ness that everyone knows where the bootleggers are located, but no one will do anything about it.
[As a humorous aside, the copy on the pirated DVD packaging is always a bizarre mess of English. It seems almost purposefully absurd, as no digital translation engine could come up with some of the odd copy. The tagline for Mr. and Mrs. Smith?
The degree of this quarter must the fire explode the most crazy and wild most intense emotion.
Yep, that sounds like Brad and Angelina alright. The back of the box read:
Turn over to clap from the rare area ram of old make. The cloth pull virtuous- skin especially and Anne Smith's husband and wife from whom the - ZHU LI4 play are a rightness of husband and wife who make person envy in the outsider eyes, but two peopleEach from effect in a secret organization, and concealed the oneself's body of the" occupation cutthroat" each other. Until assassinate the mission same alike once, both the husband and wife the result of the dark isNobody wins-----"]
Being in China, you are both figuratively and literally closer to the true cost of goods sold (COGS) of so many goods consumed in the U.S. As finished goods move from the factory line to the designer store on Fifth Ave. in NYC, their prices swell. A markup for shipping. Another one for marketing and advertising, including fees paid to the superstar athlete or model who wears it in print and on television. Another markup for general brand prestige, and depending on the product, for intellectual property rights. And of course, a markup to provide the profit margin. An $8 pair of sneakers in Guangzhou turns into a $125 supermodel in a U.S. Niketown. But when goods move from the factory line straight to a stall on the streets of China, those steps are skipped. The $8 pair of Lebron James sneakers starts at $16 at Silk Alley, to be negotiated down from there.
Those Lebron shoes are marketed on massive billboards throughout China, but ironically, the demand fueled by Nike's marketing campaigns drives most people to purchase the pirated rather than legitimate versions of the sneakers, because that's all they can afford. The middle class in China is growing, but for most Chinese, premium goods remain too expensive. The vast pirated goods market is the only way they can own a reasonable facsimile.
The same types of factories that churn out the products we pay hundreds of dollars for in the U.S. can easily be copied and charged with churning out pirated versions. The excess pool of cheap labor in China is massive. Mix all that in with a culture that's grown comfortable with piracy and it's difficult to imagine things changing anytime soon. When someone there asks you if something you own is real or fake, it's not immediately clear that one answer is better than the other. Often a high-quality fake is taken as the smarter buy. It's not going to be an easy gig selling media products or software at any sort of profit in the Chinese market, no matter how large it is, until authorities crack down on piracy.
But perhaps you're on vacation and would prefer to leave the larger issues of piracy aside so that you can snag some gifts for friends and family back home. Here's how to bargain for goods in China once you've located something you want:
Of course, not everyone is comfortable bargaining for goods, and some consider it callous and greedy to dicker (literally) over nickels and dimes on goods that are already priced far below U.S. prices. Personally, I find negotiating to be such a part of the market culture there that's it's almost a standard communications protocol. A bit of give and take, as long as it's good-natured in spirit, seems to leave both sides thinking they've ended up with more money in their pocket than they should, a happy outcome in a zero-sum game.
Hurricane Katrina rips hole in Superdome roof
It sounds like something out of The Day After Tomorrow.
Money is more valuable than time
This according to a paper presented at the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society. The researchers found that people were much more generous with their time than their money.
A transcript of Lance Armstrong's appearance on Larry King Live
I still haven't read an account of what happened that makes it clear exactly what was tested, how it was verified, etc. All this medical testing jargon is just confusing. It's shocking how eager Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc is to sully the image of his event's most famous and most recent champion. Can you imagine David Stern leaping at the opportunity to publicly lambaste one of the NBA's star players? The Tour was already going to need a lift next year with Lance gone, and this is hardly the best way for Leblanc or L'Equipe to promote next year's race.
More and more couples are streaming music from iPods instead of hiring DJs for their weddings
One couple is cited as saying that they didn't think the DJ would have music from their favorite bands, like the Postal Service and the Shins. They then note that neither they nor their wedding guests are big dancers, which explains a lot.
Marat Safin drops out of the U.S. Open with a knee injury
Thus removing one of the few players with enough game to beat Federer. Safin is replaced by Bjorn Phau of Germany, who is not among those aforementioned players. Actually, on hard courts, maybe Safin is the only guy who could have stopped Federer.
An interview with Cameron Crowe about Elizabethtown
I am intensely curious about the already famous telephone conversation from this movie. Crowe mentions that Kirsten Dunst's character makes Orlando Bloom's character a "mixmap" - a map with musical cues. Very cool, like amateur museum podcasts, in a way. I can see posting a musical mixmap as a podcast to someone in another city. More from Crowe on Dunst:
And she's a huge music fan. I play music during takes and she's the first person I've worked with who'll go, "Um, I don't like that song." The camera will be rollin' and I'll play "Trouble Man" by Marvin Gaye, and she'll go, "Turn that Marvin Gaye music off! Put on some Rilo Kiley."
She stays up all night and downloads music from LimeWire. She needs to be arrested.
During the summer TV lull, I set my PVR to tape Six Feet Under so I could finally see what the hubbub was about. From what I'd read, I'd be catching the show after it had jumped the shark, and that might explain my cool reaction. Watching the first half of this last season was like listening to one's parents arguing; really shrill and overwrought. The show also relies too heavily on confrontations with ghosts and spirits, something The Sopranos deals in occasionally as well. That's always felt like a dramatic crutch to me, a way to cover ideas that can't otherwise be conveyed by acting and dialogue between real people. I can understand how fans of the show would stick it out through every last episode, though. I was the same way with The X-Files, a show that lurched on for several seasons after it had careened off the tracks.
Lance Armstrong will appear on Larry King Live tonight (9-10pm EST) to answer the doping accusations from L'Equipe
Video of David Zabriskie's record-setting stage 1 time trial victory
TV didn't have much coverage of his ride (even though Phil Liggett predicted the win), but Cervelo gave one of Team CSC's coaches a video camera to use in the team car.
Google launches Google Talk, a chat client. It only runs on Windows, though, so I have nothing to say about it.
Oh the irony if I'd employed a Chinese hired-hand guest blogger to post here while I was on vacation in China. Apparently it's an actual business model. The description of the three blogging types they're targeting is amusing. Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the reference.
Malcolm Gladwell explicates the U.S. health care failure.
My apartment is the size of Bill's kitchen. I state it that way because it's a compliment to my apartment. Looking out his window, I see, no joke, a hummingbird sucking nectar from a flower on one of the bushes, bathed in the golden glow of sunrise. It's as if I died and woke up in heaven, or perhaps my friends sedated me yesterday and put me into a rehab clinic in Southern California. Any minute now a fat nurse will be in to give me an enema.
This is the first clean air I've breathed since...I can't even remember anymore. I'm also reminded that I really miss DirecTV.
Okay, off to the U.S. mecca of golf.
It's not often that I get to share equal billing with Ray Allen
This year's New York Film Festival lineup
Me thinks I must attend a few of these
For some reason, I can't board a plane without imagining how I'd react if it experienced some sort of mechanical failure and crashed into the earth, killing everyone on board, most importantly myself.
Even before boarding, I review my most recent communications, cell phone calls and e-mail messages, for their suitability in newspaper articles or eulogies.
Perhaps something to put the issues of life in perspective.
"'Off to the mother country. I was too cheap to spring for my immunizations...let's hope I don't catch Hep-B! Love, Euge,'" my sister would read from a printout of an e-mail. "What he didn't know was that just a short while later, Hep B would be the least of his worries when flight 82 passed over the Bering Strait and suddenly dropped into a death spiral."
Or the amusing and trivial anecdote, something to personalize me to strangers, or to remind close ones of my life's concerns. "'oh btw, do you have that girl's phone number in beijing? e-mail it to me at my gmail acct. let's hope she remembers me. put in a good word for me if you get the chance. alright, later dude,'" one of my buddies would paraphrase from a brief chat session held the day of my fateful flight. "Well, I sent him that phone number, and it's waiting for you buddy, wherever you are now."
How about my last day's activities? How would they play out in, let's say, a sequel to Gus Van Sant's sober trilogy of death that includes Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days? Would my final interactions reflect well on me?
"He always ask for his shirt folded, no starch," the plump, middle-aged Chinese woman who does my dry cleaning would recall, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. "But this time I forget and starch his shirt. He pat me on the shoulder and say, 'It's okay, Rainbow, a bit of starch every now and then helps to restore one's resolve.' I not know what he mean. But he a kind man."
I imagine in vivid detail how I'd react in my last moments.
While bent over in the crash landing tuck, I might turn my head and gaze upon the overweight, balding businessman in the seat next to me. Then I'd remove the oxygen mask from my face to reveal an expression of preternatural calm and offer him my palm. He'd grasp it, and I'd give his hand a reassuring squeeze, as if to say, "I've been through this dozens of times in my head...just follow my lead."
About half the cab drivers I encountered in China were professional. They recognized the destination took me straight there. The other half were either incompetent, crooked, or rude, or some combination of the three.
Some would pretend to know where I wanted to go, but then would drive around in circles, lost. Several times I had to sit in the cab waiting while the driver went out to ask other drivers or pedestrians for directions. Is this a function of too many new cab drivers or too rapid an urban growth? I quickly learned to always ask the driver if they knew where a destination was before I got into the cab. If they didn't know, I'd just move on to the next driver. You wouldn't want a resident performing an operation on you, and I had no interest in having cabbies learn the city on my dime.
Locals always advise that non-Chinese speakers or tourists get their destination and address written down in Chinese on a piece of paper to hand to cab drivers, but that's often not enough. Instead, you need to get the cross streets written down, and even then, it's still worth confirming that the driver knows where the destination is before hopping in.
Many cab drivers were just rude, complaining and grumbling the entire ride about one thing or another. In Shanghai, soon after I arrived, I took a cab to meet Tony at a Starbucks. Since I didn' t know the city at all, I didn't walk. As soon as the cab driver heard where I was going he sighed and started muttering under his breath about what an idiot I was for taking a cab ride through rush hour traffic when I could walk that same distance in half the time. I asked him how I should walk there, but he refused to answer me. He grumbled the whole way, sighing with audible exaggeration every few seconds.
In Beijing, Joannie, Mike, and I hopped in a cab and gave him the address of Mei's uncle's house. Joannie mentioned that he could also follow the cab ahead of us because Mei was riding in it and knew the route. The cab driver recoiled in indignation.
"You want me to follow that driver! Why? I know where that address is. What are you thinking? Follow that driver. He doesn't even know where he's going. I've driven a cab in this city for 20 years. Unbelievable. Some people." He muttered like this the entire ride. I was so surprised at his behavior that I just had to laugh, but Mike was not pleased. Joannie tried to calm him down but he was on a roll, reveling in this perceived slight.
In Shanghai, Su and I hired a car and driver for a day to take us to Hangzhou. He made more off us that one day than a nanny would make in a month and a half. The trip started fine. The driver told picked us up in a Mitsubishi SUV with industrial strength air conditioning and told us that he was a specialist in Hangzhou, a sort of Hamptoms for the masses of Shanghai. When we got to Xihu (West Lake), though, he didn't know where to find Louweilou, one of the most popular restaurants on the lake. Su and I walked all the way to the other side of the lake to Leifeng Pagoda, perhaps the most visible landmark on the lake. We called the driver to pick us up, but he didn't know where that was. After Su tried to give him directions for several minutes, the driver asked us to walk all the way back across the lake to find him instead. It was like calling for a Town Car to take you to the airport only to have the driver ask you to walk over to his office to catch a ride. He finally found us after nearly half an hour, but when we got back in the car he complained that it would have been easier had we just gone and found him. Unbelievable. I was going to say that I might as well hop in the front seat and drive while Su gave him a foot massage, but I wasn't sure my sarcasm would survive the translation into Chinese.
When we neared Su's apartment, he started acting like a pain in the ass, perhaps just to get under Su's skin. Every time she gave him a direction (turn left at the next light, or make the third right), he'd repeat it back to her skeptically, as if she didn't know how to get back to her own apartment. When we finally arrived, we paid him the agreed upon fare, but as we climbed out of the car he asked for a 50RMB tip. I'm surprised I didn't have to hold her back from delivering a roundhouse to his face.
I only got taken for a ride once in China. On our last night in Xi'an, we had to split into three cabs to go from the Tang Dynasty park to the Muslim Quarters. Mei and her cousin Summer took one cab each with a group of non-Chinese speakers in each, and Joannie, Mike, and I took the other cab. Summer told our driver where to take us, but I didn't pay attention to how to say it in Chinese, nor did I ask Summer or Mei how much the ride should cost.
Our driver recognized as out-of-towners, and soon we were on an extended tour of Xi'an. Since the heart of the city is enclosed by a rectangular city wall, we should have only crossed one gate into the city. Instead, we passed in and out of the city, and it was soon apparent what was happening. Unfortunately, if we got out, we didn't know how to tell the next driver where to go. So we rode around, fuming, shouting at the driver who kept insisting he was taking us straight to our destination. What should have been a 10 minute 15 yuan ride turned into a 40 minute 32 yuan ride. Then the driver dumped us on a sidewalk, waved his hands at the sidewalk and said we were where we wanted to be, and drove off. We had no idea where we were, and we had no cell phone to call Mei on.
I was livid and wanted to track down the driver and go Tony Jaa on him, but more importantly, we wanted to find our friends. Fate intervened when our of the blue, Mike spotted our local tour guide James, just walking down the street with his manager. In a city of some 8 million people, we'd run into him by accident. James is one of the sweetest people we met in all of China, and his beaming smile was an oasis in what now seemed like a sea of unscrupulous cab drivers.
James called Mei and walked us over to them, saving what could have been a disastrous last evening in Xi'an, which otherwise was the most charming of the cities we visited in China. Taxis are still a real bargain in China compared to cabs in other parts of the world, especially New York, but I hope that half of them learn some manners in time for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and get themselves some GPS devices.
I picture Ron Artest trying to hop a cab to the basketball stadium for a game and getting taken for a ride by a rude cab driver who doesn't know who he is. Okay, so the chances of David Stern selecting Ron Artest for the Olympic basketball team are nil. I can dream, though, and in this dream, that bastard from Xi'an who took us for a ride decides to take Artest for a ride. After a few loops through Beijing, when Artest realizes what's going on, he reaches into the front seat and starts throttling the cabbie.
I felt good about my recovery from jet lag yesterday because I managed to stay up all day, from about 8am to 10pm, despite only four hours of sleep. Still, I wasn't completely symptom free. For some reason I thought it was Wednesday and thus ventured all the way up to 138th and Riverside for a kickball game that actually takes place tonight, a trip that wasted an hour and a half of my day.
I awoke at 4am this morning and have been staring into the darkness ever since. Since I fly out to Seattle tomorrow for my annual golf trip to Bandon Dunes, I have another few hours of time shifting left to plant myself in the Pacific time zone. More than a few times during the last two weeks I've felt like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.
New York, all five boroughs put together, feels tranquil and quaint compared to Shanghai. That's how sprawling and dense and manic a city China's economic hub feels. Shanghai contains more buildings over 25 stories high than any other city in the world, and depending on who you ask, anywhere from a fifth to a fourth of all the world's roof mounted cranes call Shanghai home.
One of the first stops during my visit there was the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. On the third floor there is a massive scale model of the city as city planners foresee it looking in 2020. It's stunning in its size and density. My first night in Shanghai, I couldn't see water or trees or anything beyond the horizon in any direction from my 29th floor hotel room. High rises and office buildings and skyscrapers stretched out seemingly to the ends of the earth. The model at the urban planning museum confirmed that my suspicions weren't too far from the truth.
That Shanghai even has an urban planning museum speaks to its developmental aspirations. It's as close to urban planning pornography as I've ever seen. On every floor, massive scale models of some of its most famous sites (like the new Pudong airport; every city in China seemed to have a new airport of steel and glass) share space with 3-D CGI animations flying around, over, and through future constructions, all set to throbbing techno music. Next to the 2020 scale model of Shanghai is a display called Windows on the World, depicting famous landmarks from around the globe, like the Eiffel Tower and NY City skyline; the juxtaposition marks the height of the city's ambitions. A more literal marker is the work-in-progress that is the Shanghai World Financial Center, intended to be the world's tallest building when completed. On just one day-trip, Su took me past the world's first high-speed mag-lev train, up the world's tallest hotel, over the world's longest steel-arch bridge, and under the world's largest Ferris wheel.
Few cities of have grown faster than Shanghai in the past fifteen years, but the extent of the progress is dubious. The skyline is an incoherent blend of gaudy structures, each one more eccentric than the next in an attempt to distinguish itself. Many of them are simply hideous by the aesthetic standards of this era or the next. And as all these high rises and skyscrapers have moved in, the city's low-income citizens and more historic architecture have been moved out and razed, respectively. From the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower, every low-lying plot of land in Shanghai looked to be marked for bulldozing. It will soon be so crowded you won't be able to see the trees from the forest; every skyscraper will be flanked by several other monstrosities of equal height.
No building represents the worst of Shanghai more than the Oriental Pearl Tower (images), the most prominent structure on the Pudong side of Shanghai's skyline. Depending on your vantage point, it looks like anything from a sci-fi shishkabob, a spaceship, or the world's largest phallic symbol (Su pointed out that from one spot on the Bund, the Pearl Tower rises up from between two giant globes like...well, look for yourself). Even the few attempts at preserving the city's historic architecture can't dilute the city's epidemic of modernization. Xin Tian Di, a historic redevelopment project that reconstructed some of Shanghai's historic Shikumen tenements, is primarily a collection of fusion restaurants, clubs, and retail restaurants. It's less a preservation than a repurposing of the architecture of the past. Both Xin Tian Di and Yu Yuan (the Yu Gardens), two of the areas in Shanghai that still hint at the city's past, have their own Starbucks.
It's unclear how long this pace of development can last. When the real estate bubble bursts, the crash is sure to be spectacular. Roof cranes all over the city will come to a halt, and the unfinished frames of dozens of skysrapers will litter the city like the fossilized skeletons from some unrealized future.
It's not all bad. The flip side of all this foreign investment and real estate development is a vibrant economic hum. Just after arriving in Shanghai one afternoon, I attended a networking event at Barbarossa with Tony, an old classmate of mine. He's one of the tens of thousands of those who've moved to Shanghai in the hopes of carving out a personal fortune on the back of the macro growth trends there. I met dozens of people at the event, each of whom presented me with a business card and their two-minute fortune-seeking thesis. I felt like I was at a job fair, but the difference is that even the people who didn't have any idea how they'd capitalize on the growth in Shanghai beamed with genuine optimism. Shanghai has replaced Hong Kong as the sexy girl China employs to greet its guests at the door.
A city with a population of 18 million people shouldn't feel small, but the next night I ran into many of the same expats at Bar Rouge, one of the epicenters of the global clubbing scene right now. Nearly everyone I asked about what to see in Shanghai told me this was the club du jour. Su and I planned to head there on Friday night, but she had to fly out to Hong Kong and then back that afternoon simply to renew her Chinese visa, and a series of flight delays found me half asleep in my hotel room at 1 in the morning, watching movies in a bathrobe and fading fast. But just when I was about to write off the evening, she called.
I began to offer a mild protest, but she'd have none of that.
"I've been to hell and back today," she said. "You're coming out and having a drink with me."
When we arrived at 1:30am at 18 on the Bund, a throng of people waited outside, trying to cajole their way past the bouncers. We rang up Sam, one of those guys who's out clubbing so often that he's on a first name basis with every bouncer. He came down, parted the sea of hopefuls like Moses, and the bouncers ushered us in.
Located on the 7th floor, Bar Rouge was hopping. From the outdoor terrace, I stood under a Chinese flag blown sideways by a stiff breeze and looked out across the Huangpu river at the now darkened Pudong skyline. Inside, bartenders stacked martini glasses in a pyramid, then lit some unidentified alcoholic drink on fire and poured it over the glass pyramid so that the stream of fire descended to the bar and streamed six feet across the counter. I made quick note of the fire exit routes.
The rest of the night dissolved in bath of green tea and black labels (the local mixed drink of choice) and shots of one sort or another. All the building lights on the Bund and on the Pudong skyline turn off at 11pm (electricity is at a premium), but the youth remain lit until sunrise.
My mind is in NY already, thinking of all the things I need to take care of when I arrive home. My body is here at the United Arrivals Lounge in San Francisco airport. My body clock is trying to catch up, but it's lagging. It fell off the pace some time ago and is floating over the Pacific Ocean somewhere, northwest of Alaska.
And of course, as is the case with travel denouements, the heart is slowest to follow and mine remains somewhere in China, with friends old and new. It's no fun, these last legs of multi-hop international flights, when your heart is elsewhere and your essence is discombobulated. I'm ready for the reunion of all my parts in my bed back home.
I thought I'd have time and the Internet access to write while in China, but I had precious little of either, and the rare times they converged I lacked the will. It will take some effort to get back into a writing frame of mind, and my e-mail inbox is a bit bloated. All in good time.