Minority Report

What a step. Fred just walked through my front door ahead of me. I, backpack upon my back and dressed in one of my two changes of clothes, I just kind of paused for a second...not out of fear, really, just...well, some moments need to be noted, need to be fully experienced. In stepping over my threshold, this really began.

Thirteen and a half hours to Seoul, following the night. We were flying west at the speed of the terminator. I went 22 hours without seeing the sun. I slept a little, sat around wishing I could sleep, but restfully so, taking "No Jet-Lag," which I now highly recommend, along with run-on sentences. I splurged on snacks (nuts, dried fruit) at LAX, I guess worrying about my ability to get food. But low and behold, Orbitz forwarded my Vegetarian request and I got two nice meals on the flight : )

I was still anxious, but looking around on the flight it seemed most of these people were going home. This was a "relaxing, can't wait to get home, see friends again"-flight. I was going into the unknown. I had no idea what I was doing. No, wait a minute, drama alert. I may not know what I'm doing, but I know the next thing I want to do. Change planes in Seoul. Then get on the maglev train. Then find a taxi. Just baby step it out. I felt much better. But that juxtaposition of my anxiety and my neighbors safety...I just kept fingering it. Something deeper there. But, as what makes the different different, here was the view on the GPS map in the plane leaving Seoul. Just an everyday background picture when flying around the US, now a really frickin' cool indicator of how far I had gone.

Things discovered enroute: forgot plug adaptors and I had accidentially wiped the phrase book on my iPod. However, with very little and very bad Mandarin, I've been able to get around. Thanks to Wei Laoshi (my last Chinese professor), I even had a nice conversation with the taxi driver, discovering he had been married three times and had two children. He asked what I did for a living.

Shanghai airport has plenty of English and English speakers. Here the maglev train hit 300 km/h, which is something like 210 mph in English (ha!). From the train station, I went to the taxi stand. I had the hotel address printed out in Mandarin and, showing it to the driver, said "Wo yao qu zhe li" (I want to go here [pointing at the address]). Now I was in it. Here is a pics from the window as we drove through the southeast of Shanghai. Everything is big.

It was also exciting as he pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the taxi. Hmmm. Don't feel like I should be scared. He opened his trunk and got out a water bottle. Yelled to me "yi ping shui" which after I second realized was bottle of water, and he ran off across the street, returning with a full bottle he put back in the trunk. Huh. Also below, the view from my hotel. Old and new. And jeeze, the traffic is a complete free-for-all. We're going straight through an intersection. The way you get people to stop turning left across traffic is via the sophisticated chicken method, yep, you just head right at them. A mini-van jamming two lanes as it tries to make a right across another on-ramp on the freeway. A dump truck just cutting into the front of a left turn lane because it can. It's crazy and exhilirating.

The hotel room had the following warning. Let us all take it to heart. And now heading out to find the computer I am currently blogging on and get a simcard. Zai jian.

Dan

PS I'm doing this on a computer where all the options are in Mandarin, so it's kind of tricky to get the layout the way I want. Also, I have no jpg editting software, so this page is probably taking a while to load. I'll reduce my camera settings in the future.