DDay + 3

Not to start in the middle of things but... Today I saw a kid going to the bathroom on a plastic sheet sort of like a dog, this is after having seen a parent holding a kid over a trash can for the same reason. Some of the precious little tykes even have slits down the back of their pants to facilitate this process. This is not to say that China is a particularly dirt country, in fact Shanghai is about as clean as any major city and quite cosmopolitan, its just one really gross practice.

We had some more lectures today about how to teach the take home from which are that I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do when faced with a classroom full of expectant kids waiting for some insight from their foreign teacher. The lessons haven't been exactly unhelpful there just to general to do much good. None of the past participants have described it as exactly hard but damned if I have any idea what I'm going to do. Part of the problem is that I have no real idea what my particular school expects of me or what it will be like there. Being in Shanghai is sort of like being on extended vacation. Moving involves a sort of daily routine like you have at home just in a different area. But in Shanghai its just take every day as it comes not really sure what to expect.

That brings me to my Xbox. Some of the people here have sort of snickered at bringing it all the way from the States but I think of it as a sign that I'm not just on vacation that I'm really moving here. What I want is to get into my daily routine. Not the same routine at home mind you, I am in China, but some sort of routine never the less, and my routine involves playing video games to relax. I think that if I didn't have my Xbox it would make it like too much of a vacation something out of the ordinary not the new ordinary that I want to make it. Put another way it's a way to be comfortable here.

We had a lot of free time in the afternoon today, and for the first time I haven't felt so massively jet lagged, I'm still tired at 9 o'clock but not fall over unconscious tired. So with my new found time and energy I went with a group around the Nanjing street a shopping district near the People's Square the essential heart of Shanghai. After a while we walked over to the Bund an area of historic building near the river and some really amazing views of buildings, link to pictures coming. We were beset on all sides by pan handlers and people hawking every sort of junk imaginable when ever we stopped sort of like a bright light attracting moths to it. Our guide told us one funny story about these little wheels that the street vendors were selling that attached to your shoes and sort of let you roll around like your on skates. He said that about a year ago these had just come out so that all the street vendors selling them, who skate around on them to show off the product, weren't very good and kept crashing into people.

Yesterday we saw an acrobatics show at some fancy little theater. The show was good in other parts, seemed under rehearsed in other parts, and was just plan hokey in some parts. The best parts involved them standing on meticulously staked chairs and flying through the air on a set of sort of curtain like thing, a trick I've seen in Cirque du Soleil. The under rehearsed parts involved some diving through hoops where they would occasionally knock the hoops over and try the trick again sometimes for a couple of tries. The just plane hokey was a series of magic tricks that seemed to be out of the Vegas of the 50's style pick a card in which the secret to every trick is that the magician has a deck of cards up his sleeve.

One final note is where I got the name of this blog from. Cars and traffic laws here seem to be a still evolving thing and a red light seems to mean you might want to consider stopping. So when the little green man illuminates for me to walk and the cars are still going across all I can think is please don't run into me as I carefully try to make my way across the street.