Toto, I don't think we're in the USA anymore

  Crap, they ate Toto... just kidding

  Another week has passed and another handful of new experiences have been explored in this great skyscraper-filled city. However, I find myself clicking my ruby red slippers together (I got them cheap after haggling for about 20 minutes) to go back home but every time I wake up, I'm still here in Shanghai. It's really settling in that this isn't just a vacation but rather my new life and I have to say it does strike an emotional spot every now and then. On a side note mostly for one of my avid readers and great friends Seth Yoder, I'm listening to Judith right now and I'm stoked for you and Kasi to move to Seattle and start fresh. Like Maynard says, you're such an inspiration for me (but in a positive way unlike the song haha)! Continuing on, I've for the most part accepted the fact that I'll be here for at least the next eight months and it's time to start embracing it! So, during my coping process, I've had my fair share of fun this week and I've had a chance to check out some local hot spots full of beautiful women! So to those of you who have money riding on me already having a Chinese girlfriend by now....... Pay up! Nothing to report as of yet. So there you go folks, that's my blog post, see you next week.....

  Actually, I guess I'll tell some boring stories about coagulated chicken blood, the club scene of Shanghai, partying with some Irishmen, my first tour as the main man in charge, going back to the stomping grounds of the university I studied at last year, eating lunch with my oh-so-subtle Chinese mama, a new restaurant that I can't stay away from and learning a good amount of Chinese slang. Time for show and tell!

  This is a picture of my favorite restaurant in my local vicinity. It is a stone's throw away from my apartment and they serve up some good dishes. This is actually an ethnic Muslim restaurant and out front as you can see, there is a gold shiny thing that these two guys are standing in front of. That's actually a grill where they cook up some lamb quanr (chwar) or skewers as we might call them. This place has been my savior in these uncertain times of money flow and budgeting because I can get a hearty meal of really long noodles with beef and potato for only 8RMB ($1.20USD or so). If I'm feeling like I have a protein deficiency, then I add on two skewers of lamb meat for 3RMB apiece bringing my total cost to 14RMB which is right around $2USD. It's hard to beat this price right now while I'm figuring out how much I'll be able to spend per week with my given salary. Plus it's delicious, and all of the workers there know me now and as soon as I walk in, I hear them yell to the cooks to quickly serve up a dish of beef with noodles and they promptly set a steaming bowl of freshly made food in front of me. It's fun to joke around with them a bit in Chinese, and they love that I keep coming back.

  Although I eat at the restaurant at least 5 times a week, I don't always find myself at home when it's lunch time. The other day I was at people's square preparing for a tour at the Shanghai museum and we had lunch near the museum. I went my own way and walked into a restaurant that looked decent and just pointed at two things on the menu. Turns out I ordered a nice soup with some rice noodles, little pieces of bread, some tasty but chewy chicken stomach and some coagulated chicken blood. Last year when I was in Shanghai I tried what I call chicken blood jello and I didn't hate it, but I wasn't a big fan. This time when I tried it, I actually quite liked it! Call me a sicko if you want, but the soup was great and then when my little dragon dumplings arrived, I was in heaven! It's not on my top 10 dishes of China so far, but I would honestly eat it again.

  Speaking of little dragon dumplings, I went to my old university's campus last week to get some good old fashioned street food. Before I continue, "Little dragon dumplings" or xiao long bao (shaow lowng bow haha, it's hard to try to write the appropriate pronunciations) are just little dumplings that are filled with pork and then are steamed in a wooden basket. When they are done, they are moist and chewy with a little bit of broth-like liquid inside. I prefer to pick one up with my chopsticks, dip it into a mix of vinegar and hot chili peppers and eat it whole. YUMMMM!

  While I was walking around the campus, I saw so many familiar things that brought memories flooding in. I had mixed feelings about being back on the campus due to some extenuating circumstances of my last visit but I ultimately reveled in the feeling of being reborn in China with a chance to live life anew. Unfortunately, a lot of the street vendors have changed, and my revered xiao long bao outlet is now a crappy clothes store. What to do?! As I frantically looked around for another xiao long bao restaurant I found a welcoming sight. There was the shawarma lady with here skewered lamb and fresh baked bread with her trusty spices right beside her. To those of you who don't know, a shawarma is basically a lamb and lettuce sandwich with spices mixed in that is traditionally Muslim I believe. Either way, it's dang tasty! I was saddened to see that she had raised her prices, but it was still oh so delicious!

  After walking back out through the campus gates, I went to see if a certain Muslim restaurant was still open that we used to eat at every day last year and I was elated to see that it was. However, another sight caught my eye and I immediately changed my course accordingly. XIAO LONG BAO!!! YESSSSSSS! I was already full from all of the street vendor food I had already bought, but I didn't care, I was going to reap the fruits of my labor. Tasty, tasty.

  I decided that it was about time I treated my Chinese mama to a meal after all she has done for me in the past few weeks while getting settled in. I called her up and told her that I was taking her out to lunch on my dime. This brought about a lightning-quick blur of protests in Chinese but after finally convincing her to let me buy her a meal, she told me to bring a LOT of money. This then prompted her to laugh (thank goodness) and she told me where to meet her the following day.

  When I met her for lunch, we went to a nice hotel restaurant and were practically the only ones in there. All of the workers were staring at the odd couple made up of my Chinese mother and myself and I can only imagine what they were thinking about how her and I were connected. When we sat down, I let her do the ordering and within minutes, they were bringing out the first of our dishes. The food was quite tasty and as we sat eating the several courses, she began to do what she usually does which is to lay out heavy amounts of advice for me.

  As she sat there and told me about who to hang out with and who not to give money to etc, I couldn't help but feel like my wonderful real mother was giving me a pep talk when I was younger. Oh the memories! She also started ranting about how she has some Chinese girls she wants me to meet and some new job opportunities she thinks I should pursue after my contract is up with the tour company. She's a wealth of information and I quite enjoyed the lunch we had.

  When the bill came it wasn't too bad and to even further help out, she had a 50RMB coupon for the restaurant which brought the total down substantially. It was good to treat her and spend some time with her and I hope I can do this every two weeks or so. Don't worry mommy, you're still my #1 mom and always will be!!!

  The following night, I led my first ever tour by myself without the boss man looking over my shoulders and it was quite fun. I led a couple from Jacksonville, FL on our Ghost Tour and scared the bejeebus out of the wife. The husband got a real good laugh out of that and we all got along just fine during the tour. A lot of the tour that we do is walking from site to site so there is a lot of small talk involved which is where I thrive. They were definitely an ideal group to lead on the tour and were very warm and welcoming. As I told all of the stories and revealed some ancient Chinese traditions they were very genuinely interested in what I was telling them and they asked several follow up questions to further pursue the subjects.

  At the end of the tour we do an interactive activity involving water calligraphy. We teach the guests how to write certain characters pertaining to some of the stories we told earlier and tell them new ones with which we subsequently base our next characters on. They loved writing these characters and at the end of the tour as I left them with one last story and a small gift they couldn't thank me enough for showing them some amazing sites of Shanghai that you'll never see if you don't know where to look. As we were about to part ways, the husband handed me a handful of bills to pay for the cost of the tour. No sooner had the money been put in my hand that I realized it was too much and I asked him if he needed change. He immediately responded that I should keep it all due to my entertaining tour guiding and I promptly thanked him. Later in the evening as I was sorting out the paperwork, I realized he left me 100RMB as a tip! I'm proud of myself for having done the best job capable and being rewarded for it. It's a good feeling to know that people like what you're doing. As I'm writing this, I'm actually feeling a bit emotional thinking about it. I'm proud to be starting my professional career by putting everything I have into my work and feeling like I will be successful in the future.

  As I hang out with my local friends more and more, my language skills are seeing improvement. I learn a lot of slang from them so I can now express myself a little bit better instead of being so formal with them all of the time. It really feels like we're getting closer and with my closest local friend, we've even started calling each other a slang term for brother which denotes respect on either end. I also gave him one of my Slash T-shirts that I bought at a Slash concert to solidify our camaraderie. He said he couldn't possibly take it from me since the opportunities to buy that specific shirt are fairly rare especially with the meaning behind it but I insisted and he eventually accepted it and now wears it everywhere to show off to all of his friends.

  Soon after, I asked him to take me to a place to buy a new wallet since mine was falling apart. He took me to a shopping center and I looked at several rather nice leather wallets with a mildly hefty price tag on them and when I found the one that I was going to buy, he quickly took it from my hands, went up to the counter and bought it for me as a way of saying thank you for the T-shirt. I was quite honored that he would do that for me and I sense that we will have a very strong friendship in the years to come.

  Last but not least, I would like to talk about the recent encounters I've had with the Shanghai club scene. An American co-worker of mine lives with a bunch of Irishmen in the dorms at an international university and they went out a few nights ago and extended an invitation to me which I hastily accepted. It was nice to go to a bar with some friends for the first time in awhile although quite to my surprise (and demise) it was full of many obnoxious Americans and a live band that covered the most mundane bar songs one can imagine. The drinks weren't cheap either so I drank sparingly and tried to make conversation with the Irish although it got harder and harder to understand them the more they drank. The club was fun and the dance floor was packed with such a diverse ethnic melting pot it was unreal! We had Koreans who could only speak to us in Chinese or Germans who would use broken English to speak with Jamaicans using their Caribbean English as well as Japanese people sitting and looking on politely unsure of who they could communicate with. It was really cool to be thrown into such a multinational crowd.

  In America, the bars do last call around 1:30ish to be completely closed down by 2:00 but at 1am, the house band was just finishing. The bar cleared out a bit once it turned to pretty standard recorded club music, but we decided to stay and swap stories as we had a couple more drinks. At 2:30am, it was suggested that we move to another club/bar where my newly found friends knew a bartender. As we walked out onto the street towards a slew of clubs, it was interesting to see the normally quite reserved Chinese peoples walking around the streets in their “after-hour” demeanor. Women were not dressed conservatively as is the norm and men were quite aggressive towards women which is very rarely seen in public during the day. I also must admit that I got a kick out of watching all of the really drunk Chinese. I'm not sure exactly why it was so amusing, but I guess it's like seeing something you can't really imagine for the first time like the ever-elusive unicorn that you finally gaze upon and it's actually just a painted horse with a plastic horn taped to its head. Now that I know what China nightlife is capable of, it's time to further explore this culture that is shrouded in a mysterious fog and I'm very interested to see what other fabled creatures I will uncover.

  Thanks to all of you for reading my blog and I hope it is entertaining enough to read the whole thing through. I didn't originally want to write a massive amount but life in Shanghai has been quite interesting. Make sure you've entered your e-mail address at the top so that you get updates as to when I post new blogs. Next week I'm going to continue on with nightlife as well as show some pictures of some nice hotel interiors I've been snapping. To my brother, congratulations on graduating at the top of the top! You deserve everything you've earned. Much love to you my man. To my sister and new brother-in-law, I hope Hawaii was amazing and congratulations to you both as well, I'll let you know when the present you sent me gets here.

Peace Outside.

Tony G.