Last day in Shanghai before you go
What can you cram into a day when you got home at 3 AM and had four hours sleep? Well, let’s see, there was an errand to a $6000 a month apartment to drop off something, then there was a breakfast in an historic restaurant known throughout not just Shanghai, but Asia, for its dumplings, and a bridge there that is crooked and purposefully so, so that ghosts can’t cross it, because ghost can’t negotiate corners, or so they say, and there were koi about as big as my thigh, and then people with umbrellas and smiles, and dumplings galore, and in a certain part of the world life looks familiar, and yet not, as we sat eating yet another dumpling stuffed with ___, and I looked out at the Chinese, the Asian, building slopes of a roof that was Oriental in the familiar, and behind was a modern tower – always here in the China the old and new and it’s juxtaposition is never seamless and always jarring.