Getting Wet/KO PHA NGAN

Sarah left early in the morning.  She gave me these parting words: "Don't take Xanax and drink, or you'll die."  Psh.  Whatever, mom.  For the first time in four weeks and four countries, I spent the day alone.

Well, not totally alone. Here's a watch ad by Nicolas Cage, where he is pictured not wearing a watch.

I ate some sadness flan.

And I found one of Shanghai's favorite piss-corners.

In the morning I rode the 20 subway stops back to the airport, mostly standing, because I had made the mistake of wondering how the subway ride could possibly get any worse.  I was worried about airport security.  I hadn't had any problems with the security checkpoints in the subway, or with my previous airport entry, but carrying around a full bottle of prescription medication did make me a little uneasy.  And then, after putting my backpack on the conveyor belt, I got flagged.  Time slowed down as the conveyor belt was ran backwards, and my bag went back under the x-ray, and then pulled back out to be examined by hand.  A security officer addressed me sternly, brandishing an item from my bag.  It was my alarm clock.

One of these things is illegal, and one looks like a bomb if you don't really know anything about bombs.

"What...is...this?" she asked, holding the clock gingerly with her fingertips.  "Clock!  Alarm clock!  Time!" I replied, relieved, then realizing I shouldn't look too relieved.  She gave it one last glance, and stuffed it back in my bag without another word.  I felt like Jason Bourne.  I felt like James Motherfucking Bond.  If those Xanax pills were state secrets, I thought, I just totally espionaged you assholes.  The victory was short-lived, however, when I spent twenty dollars on fried rice and ice coffee in one of the airport restaurants.  I felt like James Bond's cousin Doug who works at the mall and knows his wife cheats on him with the high school kid at the Orange Julius.

On the plus side (?), this store exists.

My flight is with Sri Lankan Airlines, a welcome change from the usual Air Asia budget flight.  Not only do we get headrest TVs, but an actual menu for the food as well.  I watch The Tourist and drink complimentary Scotch, which comes in handy when watching a movie like The Tourist.

Thanks, Scotch!

From the Bangkok airport, I ask how to get to the train station, and am put on a bus.  I was trying to get to the island of Ko Pha Ngan, and had read that I could get a cheap train ticket to the dock.  And that was exactly the extent of my planning.  Once we near the train station, a Thai woman in charge of the bus asks me where I'm going.  I tell her Ko Pha Ngan, and she becomes very adamant that I follow her to "her" travel agency.  It'll be as cheap as the train, she tells me.

What the hell, right?  I follow her to the travel agency office, where she presides as I'm sold a joint bus-boat ticket that is actually far more expensive than the train, but the addition of the boat ticket makes me okay with it.  Sure, I've just played into this stranger's cunning hands and padded the pockets of an exploitative travel agency, but there's something nice about not having to lift a finger as other people organize my plans for me while I lie back in apathy.  Like being sedated before oral surgery; I may feel extorted and slightly frightened, but I'm free to shut my brain down and get in some good drool time.  Once I've handed over the money, the lady disappears, and I'm directed to a bus waiting just down the street that'll take me to the port at Surat Thani, and from there I'll get a boat to Ko Pha Ngan.

The really worrying thing is, I was never actually given a ticket.  They put me on the bus, and then tell me to stay while they bring one back for me.  Outside the bus on the street is an impromptu dance party, which only made me more suspicious.  What do they have to be so happy about, I thought.

The travel agency people still hadn't come back with my ticket, and the bus began to leave.  This could be a murder bus, I think.  I'm on a murder bus, and I don't even have a ticket.  That would be so typical.

The overnight bus ride is a feared and hated staple of backpacker life.  Fortunately, this was one of the better buses, just below a Greyhound in terms of comfort (as one should hope, at 30 bucks a ticket), and I had the foresight to grab some food and beer from a 7-11 before we took off.  Unfortunately, all the window seats were taken, which can make for an uncomfortable night.

I'm no stranger to long bus rides, and over the years I've developed a strategy for what experts call the "Aisle Seat Conundrum".  I find an empty seat next to a nice-looking non-skinny girl.  We make pleasant small talk, after which I offer some food, maybe some beer, maybe some invaluable witticisms about whatever movie is playing (this is 100% always a hit).  I let a decent amount of time pass, and then pretend to nod off in my seat.  Ever so slowly, I let myself slide over, until my head falls on my shoulder, and then I "wake up"!  I stammer an apology, smile sheepishly, to which she'll say something like "Aw, that's alright..."  Now it's time to grin, but only in my brain, because she's just fallen into my trap.  Now I can happily rest against a total stranger's shoulder, while all the suckers around me in aisle seats are forced into more and more intricate yoga positions in their fruitless bid for sleep.  You can even try it with a skinny girl, provided she's got a soft coat or hipster scarf or something.  I guess guys work too, if you're less prejudiced about your meat-pillow.  The muscly ones feel real nice, I bet.

Don't try to hang out with your human cushion afterwards.  Don't make it weird.

The ride to Surat Thani takes about 8 hours, after which we waited in the bus depot for another hour before being driven to the pier.  Our bus tickets are swapped for boat tickets, which I'm given despite not having the boat ticket.  Things are working out after all, it looked like.

It's on this last leg of the drive that my bladder finally reached critical mass.  I had peed at the last stop, but the beers broke a seal that every bump in the road painfully worsened.  And there are a lot of frigging bumps  on a Thai road.  With my back hunched over and knees locked together, I made my way to the bathroom on the board, only to discover that it was locked.  I knocked on the door, waited a few moments, knocked again, and nothing.  It was unoccupied, and locked for reasons unknown but almost certainly diabolical.  I had a few options now.  The most obvious was I could wait until the bus stopped again, while my bladder exploded and I died.  That was unacceptable.  The other options required more creativity.  But I didn't get a B.A. in Fine Art for nothing.

The bathroom was at the bottom of the stairwell, connecting the first class seating in the front of the bus on the lower deck with the economy seating on the upper deck, where I was seated.  All was quiet at the moment, and everyone seemed to be asleep.  The toilet may have been locked, but I noticed that the sink was outside, in the open.  Opposite the sink was the door to the first class cabin, which looked sturdy and easy to block.  The trouble would be the upper deck, as there would be no stopping anyone from coming down the stairs.  One look over the railing and I was busted, but I had no choice.  I was desperate.  So, with legs splayed apart to both straddle the sink and block the first class door, my eyes desperately scanning the upper railing like a cornered mongrel, I peed in the sink.  A bright, never-ending stream of liquid yellow shame.

It wasn't easy.  I have a shy bladder in the best of times, and rabid paranoia makes for a poor diuretic, not to mention the sheer logistics of trying to piss with your legs angled wildly four feet apart on a moving bus.  And then the faucet wouldn't work.  I had no choice but to hope the urine would finish trickling down the drain by the time we stopped again.

We reached the pier and while it hadn't finished draining, at least there was no tell-tale foam.  Unfortunately, the smell had not fully dissipated.  I got to watch an entire bus of sleep-deprived backpackers wince as they passed one-by-one through the ammonia-drenched failure box.

I am so sorry.

I shouldn't have peed on that.  Another thing I wish I could stop saying.

At the pier we have another hour wait before we can board the boat, which provides enough time to visit a real bathroom and wash my hands figuratively and very, very literally.  While washing up, I notice my soap dispenser has a little guest.

If you could harness uncontrollable shivering as an energy, this soap would be a perpetual motion machine.

The boat first stopped at Ko Samui, then continued on to Ko Pha Ngan.  After the shuffle of passengers disembarking and the crew unloading luggage, I overheard a British girl sobbing to her friends.  At some point during the voyage, all of her cash was stolen from her bag in the luggage compartment.  Earlier, I had read quite a bit about this sort of thing happening on buses, and thus tried to never leave anything valuable in my larger backpack.  I empathized with her, but felt sufficiently superior in my own savvy travel sense.  Who leaves a great deal of money in an unattended bag?  The girl was practically begging for it to be stolen.

We finally reached the dock in Ko Pha Ngan around noon.  Once disembarked, I was struck by a great mix of relief, joy, and homecoming.

Yup, drink it in.  Drink it all in.

I had been to Thailand once before, but until this moment I had had no chance to appreciate the nostalgia of return, having been caught up in relentless cross-country movement since boarding my flight.  More excitingly, this was where my plans ended.  I had booked a bungalow for a week here, and had nothing planned beyond that.  I could go anywhere, with anyone, and my actions were limited only by my ever-loosening sense of morality and civil behavior.  This was what made people quit their jobs and empty their savings. This was what sold millions of Lonely Planets.   This was pharmaceutical-grade freedom.

I still had to get to my bungalow, which very quickly presented some hurdles.  For one, I hadn't printed out an address.  This was an easy fix, though: I ducked inside the first internet cafe I saw and wrote the pertinent info down.  The bigger hurdle was I had come during the Songkran festival, a New Year's celebration that consists of everyone in Thailand drenching everyone else in as much water as humanly possible

Here's a little girl kindly spraying passersby with a hose, like the cutest riot police.

Sure, there are some traditional religious underpinnings to the whole thing, but that sort of shit isn't going to fly in Ko Pha Ngan.  Unless that shit is colored talc, which was very popular for throwing on people who had been recently doused.  I hopped on a tuk tuk bound for the vague direction of my lodging, and we would be ambushed every minute on all sides by buckets, hoses, bottles, and water guns of every caliber.  Having learned my lesson about mixing water and electronics already through my MP3 player, I decided I should probably do something about the backpack that was starting to soak through on account of being in the general vicinity of me.  There was a luggage rack on the roof (that the smarter passengers had taken advantage of before they got in), and so I hung off the back off the tuk tuk, one arm clutching the railing and the other arm attempting to lift my entire backpack and fling it on top.

My sunglasses were clipped to the neck of my shirt, and in the midst of my flailing they came unhooked and went flying into the street.  I watched dumbly as our tuk-tuk drove on, leaving them behind.  It was about 5 minutes later that it occurred to me I might've asked the driver to, well, stop.  Too late now.  Of all the things I had bought for this trip, only my swim trunks and my netbook were left, and that was only providing the latter had escaped the festivities un-soaked.

The tuk tuk dropped me off in Haad Rin, at the southern tip of the island.  My bungalow was supposed to be near Haad Rin Nok, or Sunrise Beach, also the location of the monthly Full Moon Party.  After hiking around the hills for an embarrassingly long time and getting multiple conflicting directions from people, at last I found the Venus Resort.  The resort sits along a hill overlooking the far end of the beach, not quite in view but within easy walking distance.  Once let into my room, I looked over the damage.

The contents of my bags had made it through okay, but everything in my pockets was utterly soaked.  This included my passport, which now had many stamps leaking ink through the pages, and my wallet with all my Thai and Chinese cash.  I laid the passport out on the desk to dry, along with 30-odd cash bills, and prayed that I hadn't just set off the spidey sense of every burglar in Thailand.

The room itself was bare to a fault, as can be expected for a 10 dollar-a-night bungalow.  There was no towel, no toilet paper, no promised wi-fi, and the shower was so busted that it seemed to want to conserve as much water as was being wasted outside.

You could get the same pressure and amount of water if you just had a guy stand above you and squirt a mouthful of water between his teeth.

The most worrying thing about the room was the door that wouldn't shut.  So, I'll just keep it locked all the time, I figured.  I locked the door, and discovered that it would still open if pulled hard enough.  Not the greatest situation when you have 500 bucks lying on a desk in the open.  Maybe stealing from tourists is really exaggerated, I thought.  That sort of stuff probably almost never happens.  Like, say, someone's bag getting robbed on a boat.  Never happens.

I tried to nap but to no avail, so instead I took a quick hobo shower (just wet the important bits) and headed out to rediscover Sunrise Beach.

This is what no responsibility looks like.

This was my second time visiting this particular beach, after a trip to Thailand nearly a year earlier.  I had forgotten about the massive heat, for which the ocean breeze was a welcome tonic.  April is the beginning of the hottest time of the year for Thailand, which made me real thankful for the shorts I had bought back in Shanghai.  Travel Tip: when traveling to Southeast Asia during the hottest time of the year, pack shorts.  Don't forget them because you packed your shit in 20 minutes before your flight, while drunk.  I really can't stress this enough.

It was past noon, but there were still crowds milling about, some people playing volleyball, some sunbathing, some swimming.  For the off season it seemed to be an awful lot of people, but then it was also only 5 days till the Full Moon Party, one of the biggest and most famous beach parties in the world.  It was going to get a little crowded.  I walked along the beach, remembering the sights...

The tide carrying in last night's bucket drink straws...

Creepy inbred island dogs scavenging for food...

Mellow Mountain's siren call of hallucinogenic treats...

The line of bucket drink stands were intact, but the signs had changed.  I looked with concern for my personal favorite JAMIE ROCK STAR bucket stand, and found it in good health, although slightly modified from when I had last seen it.

Now with 900% more Paul Rudd references.

Although I think I have a new favorite, in BETHLEHEM'S FUCK BUCKET.

Seeing the beach again reminded me of Jessie, who had been with me on my last visit.  I realized again how alone I was.  If I got too fucked up, there was no cavalry, no shoulder for support.  This was it.

Fuck it.  I bought some counterfeit Ray Bans and signed up for scuba lessons.  Freedom's still a hell of a thing.

China on Skates/SHANGHAI

China was next on the itinerary, where we would meet with some friends of ours in Shanghai.  After checking out of the hotel, we wait at a nearby restaurant for our ride, while I breakfast on yogurt and muesli.

Without a hangover to provide the proper self-punishment, I compensated with a bowl of flavorless uncooked oats.

Our van back to Vientiane is late to pick us up, and the drive is exactly as pleasant as you might imagine a budget ride across Laos might be.  What should have taken 3 hours instead takes almost 6, as the van stops about every half hour to grab more passengers, with new seats folding out of hidden compartments from seemingly every surface.  Soon the eight passenger vehicle is carrying a great deal more, and there's no room to do anything but sit as straight as possible with your baggage clutched close to you.  Sleep is impossible, of course, and fresh air becomes a cruel exercise in aversion therapy, as every stop we make to stretch our legs means picking up another human-sized body heat generator.  It got so hot and sticky in the van, and we were packed in so tight, from the outside it must have looked like the world's most polite and dead-faced orgy.

We emerge from the ultra-compressed interior of the van into the almost-completely empty Wattay airport in Vientiane.

There is a cat though, in the airport.  Some things really make you think, about terrorism and all.

Also, Ms KEK.  She makes me think about other things.  More confused, erotic things.

From Laos we fly to Shanghai (the one in China), but first a layover in Bangkok.  The layover is supposed to take 7 hours, but I'd been to Suvarnabhumi Airport before and remembered it be quite comfortable, so I wasn't too bummed out.  After all, I'm a classy traveler who knows the names of airports.

'Cause I'm smart.

It's an overnight flight, which means a great deal more sitting around and letting my greasy pores slowly cover my body in a warm filmy membrane.  By the time we land, my hands are so oily that when I clench my fists it sounds and feels like a wet swamp fart in my palm.

When we touch down, the first thing I do (after a quick hobo shower in the restroom) is test out an ATM, and find that my debit card is still not working.  I'm getting pretty worried at this point, and to that end I send off an email to my credit union, in the hopes that I might have access to money at some point in the near future.  For the time being, Sarah is gracious enough to cover our expenses and loan me some spare cash.

Airport Customs goes by surprisingly quickly, but we do find ourselves stopped by a broken subway ticketing machine, which takes an exceedingly long time and several ranks of bureaucracy to fix.  It's been almost 24 hours without sleep, and we still have 20 subway stops to go until we reach our digs in Shanghai.  But these were no ordinary stops.  For some reason, the train conductor could not start or stop the train smoothly a single time, and rarely could they stop the train in the right location.  This meant stopping, inching forwards or backwards slowly, stopping again, then inching a little more for good measure.  At one point the train doors opened and closed three times at a single stop, and these doors were not quick to do either.  I will say this for the subway, though, it taught me that old Chinese men love to sing to themselves.  Now you have that information, and can hopefully do more with it than I.

At least the train has a great view of the smog.

For our stay in Shanghai, Sarah had arranged for us to crash at her friend Mitchell's apartment.  Mitchell had previously worked at the same English academy in Korea as us, but broke his contract to move to China.  He's won't be back from Taipei until tomorrow, but we manage to sneak into the building as some other residents are leaving.

This fence(?) was standing in the lobby, presumably being all politically biased.

After a shower and a nap that wished it were so much more, we head back out to get dinner.  Even though Shanghai is a huge, ultra-modern metropolis, Sarah and I are still very much stared-at as we walk towards downtown.  The city itself seems perpetually downcast as a result of all the pollution created by rapid development and urban sprawl.

Pictured: That perfect moment when you realize the fog isn't dissipating, and also it isn't fog.

Street vendors harass constantly, trying to sell (counterfeit) designer bag, clothes, and iPhones.  Most of them have laminated cards they can shove in your face with pictures of all the Prada and Gucci and Louis Vuitton that can be had at "good pri' for you."  What was unnerving about a lot of the vendors I encountered were the light-up plastic wheels they were selling that strap onto your shoes.  I've got quite a bit of experience dealing with street sellers, but never ones on roller skates.  To turn away a haggler only for him to keep up with you without having to walk, red lights flashing under his feet, felt dreamlike, and not un-demonic.

Between the two of us Sarah and I probably knew negative Chinese, but we didn't let that influence our choice of restaurants.  We found a tiny hole-in-the-wall, pointed at a couple pictures of dumplings, grabbed some seats by the window, and hoped for the best.  Luckily, they understand "beer", and we're able to get a great big bottle for less than a dollar.

In fact, this entire spread cost less than 5 dollars.  Commies, you're alright.

While we were eating, we kept hearing this loud screeching coming from behind us, in the kitchen.  For a while I figured it was a broken appliance, or some sort of exotic and annoying cooking method I didn't know about.  That's what I figured until the screeching came our way, and my eyes traced the source to a giant rat above us, scurrying along the pipes hanging from the ceiling.

Remy's come a long way.

We're asked if we want any more beer.  I have to give them credit, the place did have great hole-in-the-wall service, in addition to the very real holes in the wall, one of which the rat was currently escaping into.  We finish the dumplings, leaving our bowel health for fate to decide.

On the way back to the apartment we stop in a convenience store, to stock up on beer and any random Chinese liquors that caught my eye.  There's a policeman by the counter, who thinks it is just funny as all get-out when I say "xie xie" to the clerk.  The cop offers me a cigarette and grins, revealing a mouth where teeth had long ago lost a terrible civil war.  I don't smoke, but I also learned I don't turn down toothless Chinese police officers.  For five minutes we smoked in the store, and he kept urging me over and over to repeat the only Chinese words I knew, which were "ni hao" and "xie xie".  He would say one of the words, I would repeat it, and he would burst out in a gum-filled giggling fit.  Over and over.  Finally I gave my best "well I'd love to keep doing this forever and ever until I die but you know" expression, and quickly backed out of the store, his laughter following us as we made our exit.

And for all I know, he's still laughing.

The next day we meet up with some other friends of ours from Korea, David and Amy (this is at nighttime, because apparently what I do during the day in a new country is eat KFC and watch bootleg DVDs, but in a cultural way).  Both were fellow English teachers, albeit for other academies, and now they worked at a Chinese university in Hefei.  Mitchell, back now, takes everyone to dinner at a Taiwanese restaurant.  He orders food for the table, which is all delicious, but I admit my memory is dominated entirely by the dessert of flan on a bed of shaved ice.

Like ambrosia having sex with your mouth.

Our group is led to a popular expat bar in the area called Windows Too, which follows the Asian tradition of sticking "Too" onto the end of a bar expansion's name.  Long Islands are five bucks here, which made me feel good about being thrifty while spending someone else's money, and made my liver sigh, lie back, and think of England.

Each of the tables had a set of dice for some sort of betting game that was a big deal with both the locals and the expats.  One of Mitchell's friends tried explaining the rules to me, but somehow despite four concentration-sharpening Long Islands I still kept losing.  With no other explanations before me, my only conclusion is dark, Eastern magic.

Put plainly, every Chinese person is clearly a powerful sorceror.

I don't want to say this statue of a nearby armored rhino is proof, but I also don't want to say it won't come alive in the light of the full moon and hunt down a magician's enemies.

We left Windows Too at around 1 a.m.  We could have gone home, but as I understand it, Chinese national law dictated that we had to first go to a karaoke joint and continue drinking and singing for at least another two hours.  Every song I sang was beautiful and perfectly in-tune.  There was a lot of canceling of my songs by the others, but that's just, you know, jealousy, and just sad for them.

I should probably be a professional, but music is so political, you know?

To everyone's total shock and surprise, we wake up with raging hangovers (honestly, I was actually a bit surprised, after Southeast Asia's mystical hangover prevention).  Sarah and I meet David and Amy for lunch, and set off to find the perfect morning-after meal.  And wouldn't you know it, we run across a Pizza Hut.  Having lived in Korea, I knew to expect some differences, but pizza's pizza, even if this dining room did seem a lot fancier than it needed to be.  Maybe they'll do something wacky like put corn on it.  Or...they'll hand you a goddamn steak menu:

And a freaking wine selection:

After flipping through the book back and forth a couple times, I was able to conclusively say that yes, they did actually serve pizza in this Pizza Hut.

Still not entirely sure if it wasn't all a waking dream, though.

In addition to my pizza, I ordered an appetizer of escargots, followed by bread pudding for dessert.  That was what I ate at Pizza Hut.

Did I mention the escargots?  The Pizza Hut escargots?  Oh goddammit, there's something I have to fix in this timeline, isn't there.

After eating the most confused meal that Werner Herzog never made a movie about, we headed downtown for some shopping.  Finally, I would have shorts.  The street dealers were out in full force on their colorful roller skates, but this time we had a secret weapon.  David had taught us to say "bu yao", which means in Chinese "I don't want".  However, instead of ruing the day and so forth, these people actually seemed to gain power from our attempts to tell them off in their own language, and they laughed and laughed.  Sarah, not one to be beaten so easily, started to combine a shouted "Bu Yao!" with the "suck-it" crotch chop, which seemed to have the desired effect.  There wasn't much a dealer could do to retaliate, after that.

That sound you hear is the sad rumble of roller skates rolling away in defeat.   It's...not a common sound.

We end up on Nanjing Road, one of the world's busiest shopping streets, and a place where a guy is almost certain to find at least one pair of short pants for sale if he looks hard enough.  Despite being the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, the street was as crowded as its reputation suggested.  I don't know if it was a regular fixture, but there was a saxophonist playing from a golden veranda above the street, where old couples had gathered to dance.

And the Chinese Billy Idol.

One of the biggest tourist destinations in Shanghai is easily the the Bund river and the view it provides of the neighboring skyline:

A bunch of space penises ruled over by a spiked uber-dick and its robo-balls.  If you squint a bit.

While we all took pictures of ourselves standing in front of One-Nasty-Riot-Away-From-Cyberpunk City, a queue actually started to form of Chinese people who wanted to take pictures with Sarah.  Once enough tourists had gotten a photo with a real live blonde white girl, we adjourned to the Bund Brewery, where a glass of beer costs about 10 dollars, and tastes like a world where McCarthyism was right about everything, especially dodgy microbrews.  I tried a lager that was cloudy and foul, and a dark beer that might actually have been Bund water in a glass.

The beer was bad and tasted of Communism.  That's the joke.

A rooftop hookah bar later in the evening offered similarly disappointing and expensive drinks, but had a really spectacular view.  Which is good, because also our hookah didn't work.  We end up back at Windows Too, where I find the dice game just as impenetrable, but notice a number of interesting and helpful posters:

Homer nooo

noooooo

 For our last day together before David and Amy went back to Hefei and Sarah returned to Korea, we explored the Old City of Shanghai.

Everywhere, everywhere, are people trying to sell Mao merchandise.  For stuff dedicated to the founder of Chinese communism, it was one of the most flagrant displays of capitalism I've ever seen.  Shops line every street offering the best deals on shirts with Obama's face done up in Communist garb, or Little Red Book lighters for souvenirs.

Also, a lot of Chinese erotic vampire fiction fans.  Just like Mao wanted.

We eat lunch at a cozy little halal place that is bare empty when we arrive, and fills to capacity promptly at 12 p.m. when every Chinese person in the city takes lunch all at the same time.  Moving on, we pass alleys where locals sit around bags of leather and metal buckles and put together the "designer" belts someone on the next street is sure to offer.  Amy goes into a convenience store, and buys something called Baijiu.  From what I've read since, it's a Chinese liquor with 5000 years of history and a number of distinctive complexities.  But that's all bullshit.  Actually, it's a fifty cent flask of Fuck You Firewater.

All that Chinese on the label is calling you a pussy, and your mother something that doesn't really make sense to Westerners but you should probably be offended anyway.  Like, she's a donkey that doesn't go to church enough.

Passing around the one flask of noxious spirits is enough to get all of us in the group staggering.  Before standing balance becomes impossible, we walk into a bamboo park and take seat around a table in the center.  Kids run around nearby, rough-housing and learning just how much violence their parents will let them get away with (a lot, so long as it is performed in the manner of kung fu).  Next to our table sits a dirty diaper left by a previous family, which bothers one less after they've seen how Chinese mothers will often let their infants take standing dumps in public.  In fact, you'll often see babies with split opening in their pants for just this disgusting purpose.

We drink a round of beers, do the usual reminiscing about Korea, and before long David and Amy have taken off to catch their train.  Sarah and I meet back up with Mitchell, now off work, who brings us along for the real Shanghai past-time: Bootlegging.

First, we head to an entire mall of counterfeit stores, where Sarah is able to buy a pair of knock-off Lady Gaga Heartbeats earphones, and I buy some of those sweet sweet Mao souvenirs that go against everything he and the Republic he founded stood for.  Next, Mitchell takes us to where he personally buys his bootleg DVDs, which is, no joke, in the back of a bookstore through a secret passage behind a swinging bookcase. In addition to DVDs the store in the back also sells the photocopied books I became familiar with in Vietnam.  Sarah buys a couple books, while I just stand there, ecstatic that I actually got to go through a trick bookcase in my lifetime.

As I said earlier, it was Sarah's last night in Shanghai, and the end of her time traveling with me.  After a lavish dinner at an amazing Hong Kong-style restaurant, we retired early back to Mitchell's.  I buy a plane ticket online for Bangkok, and Sarah leaves me a parting gift: $500 cash (in Chinese Yuan), and a bottle of Xanax.  The cash in case my debit card didn't work, and the Xanax for "making friends," she said.  It was one of the tougher goodbyes I've had to say.  Without human companionship, or a working mp3 player, it was going to get lonely on the road.  But, at least I had a new bottle of pill-shaped friend-makers to help me along.