Shanghai Saturday

We waited too long buy our train tickets and got stuck having to take the "green" train. It's and older traditional train. Ivy thinks it's funny we're on an old train. She says she hasn't been on one of these older trains for several years and she uses them a lot. It only goes 160 kilometers per hour (100MPH). We also had to leave out of the older train station. I'm thinking, cool. New experience. Playing the laowai game I've already spotted two foreigners today out the thousands of people packed all around me. Weird thing, I'm way taller than most of them so I can see the whole crowd. It's a cacophony of similarity.

A moment of terror. We get to the front of the mile long line and scan my passport. The red light comes on. Not good. Dude looks at me and frowns. I hand him my passport and he scans it properly. Green light and I get to proceed. I don't want to be "that" guy that holds up the line. Especially being the laowai.

Ivy tells me she has a museum she wants to check out tomorrow. I'm down with that.

Draft day grades are flying all around. I hate that. I've complained about the idea so often that my friends are giving me a bad time about it. When I used to frequent the footballguys.com message boards I started a new thread each year asking fans to go back three years and grade their team's draft. It's a good excercise in understanding realistic expectations. I got away from this for a few years. I did it again today. You can check them out here.

Part of this Chinese experience has been experimenting with different foods. I made an extra special effort today to have a Chinese breakfast at the hotel.

Working around the plate, fried noodles, shao mai, egg tart, baozi, and fried bread. I had a hard time deciding what I liked best. It's was all good. The most common breakfast food I've noticed so far is the baozi. It's a rice flour that's steamed with different fillings inside. This one had pork. The red bean is popular, but I certainly like the ones with meat in them better. Ivy tells me the egg tart and fried bread aren't Chinese in origin, but they're becoming popular.

We started to head towards the Shanghai History Museum, but it was raining fairly hard so we opted to wait it out in the hotel lounge with a pot of mint tea and our book. I've been reading to Ivy as she enjoys English literature, but struggles with a lot of the vocabulary. We finished The Great Gatsby today which really bummed her out. We may watch the Luhrman directed film version later. I'm a sucker for a book with a great first page. Gatsby is probably my favorite opening as the character Nick explains the lesson in objectivity he got from his father. I aspire to be objective in all things, but realize that at times it causes me to descend into moral relativism. There are times when we have to take a stand and decide what we believe is right or wrong.

Tune in tomorrow to hear about our museum experience.