La Dolce Vita a Shanghai

(My earlier post "Osaka Nudo Gekijo" will be reposted in it's entirety when I return to Japan in mid-September)

I once again took the good ship Xin Jian Zhen to Shanghai on July 25, skirting the north coast of Cheju island to avoid Typhoon #5, and arrived to a reunion with my wife Lingling and my son Dario, now 1 year and 8 months old.

Like everywhere else Shanghai is broiling in tarmac-melting temperatures, thanks to everything Al Gore said (so it's all his fault). I hope you are coping, but we are staying cool bye eating cheap watermelon (which Dario likes to smash on the floor when we are not looking) and by hanging out on Saturdays at the Purple Mountain Hotel rooftop pool party in Pudong district. The roof deck of our Zendai Gardens Aparmtnet gets some nice breezes in the evening and offers us a decent urban sunset.
But we hope to enjoy the real thing when we both get down to Thailand for a week on August 20.

On August 6 we met up with a friend of a friend in town, Will Runyon, at the glamourous Glamour Bar on the Bund for an afternoon of concert cello in sumptuous surroundings in honor of Lingling's Birthday. We then went off to a regal seafood dinner at a palacial restaurant full of tanks of delicious and probably endangered underwater species, including sturgeon, wrasses, shark/sharkfin and, yes, waterbugs.
You can view the whole album here:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/shinpath/album?.dir=d646scd

Shanghai continues to expand and amaze. Thanks to the efforts of a few preservationists, enough of the old architercture and row house districts are being saved, but only just. Country people continue to pour in, 3 million last year alone. I spent a broiling afternoon people watching around Shanghai
Railway Station, where these masses squat in the sun, their meager baggage and possessions wrapped in rice sacks and rope, either waiting to leave or for their local connection to arrive. 100 million on the move at anyone time, so they say. I wish them well.

I found a gripping book about another great migration here, the one at home along
the Mexican-American border. The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea reads like an account of the Titanic, but this time all of the passengers were Mexican migrants from Veracruz. The true account tells how a group of 30 were led
by an inexperienced 'coyote' into the desert of SW Arizona, the 'devil's highway,' got lost, and then one by one,how half of them slowly died from thirst and exposure to the sun. Urrea finds sympathy for the Border Patrol, who tried to rescue the survivors with all of their resources, and scorn for both the American and Mexican governments who let the traffic continue unabated. I learned about how the coyote gangs recruit,manipulate, and often abandon their human cargos, in much the same way that the snake heads in China do. It brought back memories of waiting in the desert in the town of Sonoita, only we were getting clearance to go south. I'm sending a copy to my father.