Beer on the Bund

I am having a beer at an outdoor cafe on the Bund. I needed to escape a couple of tea crazed teenagers. Teenagers, they are the same everywhere, always with the tea. The Bund is the river front on the Huangpu River facing Pudong. It is lined with old banks and trading houses from the glory days of Shanghai when it was the center of commerce for all of China. It's also thick with street hawkers, watch sellers and the youngsters just dying to practice their English. It's the perfect storm of harassment for foreigners, and it's really getting hard to take. I sometimes get the urge to stand in the middle of all this and yell at the top of my lungs, "Doesn't anybody just want to be my friend" to which I'm sure the reply would be "OK, sir, I'll be your friend, you are skinny for an American, now lets get some tea."

So I grab a beer and sit outside and watch the people go by and enjoy the protective shield that the cafe provides me. There is a blimp doing maneuvers about 100 feet about the river; weird. The river is hustle and bustle with the commerce of Asia, barges totting coal, timber and machinery up and down the river.

The sky is so gray it's hard to make anything out on the other side of the river. I miss the bright blue skies of Los Angeles. I really have to think that most of this is fog, because if it were smog, we would all be laying on the sidewalk like fish in the sun, desperately flapping our gills.

I circle back towards the main shopping drag, enjoying the relative calm of the side streets. What's interesting is that the old electrical wires that used to power the electric street cars, are still hanging above most of the streets. This district reminds me of Wall Street. But as soon as I set foot back on the shopping plaza, I am descended upon and I quickly make my way down the subway stairs to escape.

I head out to Zhongshan Park, about a mile from the hotel, and enjoy the people and the lack of harassment and the trees, which want nothing from me. As I head back towards the hotel after my respite, I take a few streets that I have not traveled before, Dingxi Lu to Wuyi Lu. They are only a block over from streets I have walked a couple of times before, but this is the beauty of Shanghai. Every single street here is completely different, with it's own charm and flavor and sites and smells. This is what's so amazing about this place. You have to walk down every single street, because if you don't you will miss something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.