Well, I made it back to this sacred place.  I don’t know why this was so strange and surreal to me but it seemed like almost no time went by in between the time I was sitting in the office in Palo Alto, finishing up some last minute work, committing to SVN and ~13 hours later when I was sitting at some random restaurant in Shanghai, eating with my good buddy George and his girlfriend, JJ and her parents.  Such a strange contrast over such a short period of time.  I guess I am usually taking longer flights, with one or two stops and not going directly to a restaurant with the gf’s parents directly from the airport.  (Oh yah, and this was the first time anyone actually picked me up from the airport with a private car, that was cool.  Usually its lugging around in that rickety bus for an hour, then lugging the suitcase a few blocks.)

Eventually we found ourselves checked in to a hotel near JJ’s parents house, which is in the outskirts of what a tourist would consider Shanghai.  It’s out in the boonies as it were so there was not much to do other than walk to the parents house, walk back to the hotel.  Plus the heat and humidity is absolutely miserable and everyone keeps telling me the weather is cooler these past couple of days, that I’m lucky.  Wooo.

The hotel was pretty nice your standard fancy Chinese hotel with all the Chinese amenities.  You got your selection of weird items like toothbrush, mini toothpaste, comb, shower cap, cotton swabs, slippers and all the things most people come to expect in a hotel.  There was a funny moment when we first got into the hotel with JJ’s parent when the mom was checking out the room, to make sure it met her ’standards’ (As if it wasn’t too late to do anything about it, we had already been checked in for hours).  She perused the room, look for anything she might find to shake her head in disgust.  Finally she found it.  The slippers.  She unpacked them from the plastic wrapper and shook her head in abhorrence to show that the slippers were not good and crappy.  The funny part is that all slippers in Chinese hotels are exactly the same.  I literally cannot think of any hotel in the entire time I’ve stayed in China where the slippers were any different.

Now I’m finally shacked up in a more stable facility.  We finally found a one bedroom apartment near People’s Square which is a little more suitable for working and living.  It is nothing special, quite a small little place.  It is furnished and it has internet (crappy but acceptable).  We have a nice mixed view of Shanghai out our bedroom window.  In the distance, the famous TV tower which is shown anytime the city of Shanghai is shown.  In between the distant view though are blocks and blocks of slums.  Its a quaint setting.

I’m looking forward to visiting some of the restaurants I liked a lot in Shanghai.  There is this really awesome sushi buffet in Shanghai that has all the salmon, cod and beer you want for like $20.  We went to some nice places so far with the parents.  We had planned on going to a Xin Jiang (the Chinese people in the far north who are mostly Muslim) restaurant last night, one that I had been before like 6 months ago.  We took a taxi to where we thought it was, only to find out it had gone bankrupt since I left.  Too bad, we’ll make it to some Xin Jiang place in the near future.

Alright, its work time now.  I had thing whole plan to try and get a ton of followers on Twitter during my trip and start posting to that.  Then I realized Twitter is blocked in China right now.  Makes things a little more difficult.  Damn.