We dined at a place named Samba Sushi, a Brazilian sushi bar showcasing raw fish combined with Latin flavors and sauces, the kind of quirky fusion type cuisine New York seems to excel in. This luxury was all a far cry fr

I lived in Chicago for little over a year in 2001-2002 during which time made every effort to see and do everything of interest in the Midwest, so it was a bit up a struggle to come up with ideas for new things to see and do in Chicago. One is Millennium Park, under construction at time of my residence and one of which I used to have a bird's eye view from my south facing office on 35th floor of AON building (the tall white skyscraper in the background of several of my photos). Millennium Park was completed behind schedule and well overbudget but is still an impressive urban space and more than just a green space. The modernist sculptures and buildings by world-renowned artists and architects like Anish Kapoor and Frank Gehry make it a sight in and of itself and a true addition to Chicago's cityscape.

From Millennium Park my eye was drawn time and again to the AON building where I spent more than a year of my life crunching numbers while chained to a computer like a caged animal in one of America's corporate hellholes. This was my last experience working what many would call a "proper job" as a wage slave in the salt mines of corporate America. Even now, five years into my free life as a nomad, the sight of my last place of captivity still sends shivers down my spine.

I enjoy seeing how cities change over time, and there have been considerable ones in Chicago over the last 5 years. What was already a very nice and very clean downtown area is now even more lively than just a few years before due to a proliferation of new residential towers, something especially true of my old 'hood where the empty golf driving range I viewed from my window in North Harbor Tower has since been developed into an urban park surrounded by glassy highrise condos. The panoramas from a couple of my favorite Chicago viewpoints like Navy Pier (the touristy entertainment complex jutting out into Lake Michigan) and the Michigan Avenue Bridge towards the canyon of tall glass and steel skyscrapers along both sides of the Chicago River are as spectacular as ever; only now they are filled in with more buildings, including the Trump International Hotel and Tower just west of the Wrigley Building.

I realized I had never been to the observation deck at John Hancock Tower, so we had to make that a stop. Yes, like a good tourist I paid my $10 for the ride up for the view, although some locals insist you can go for free to the lounge/restaurant on a high floor for just as good a view and get a drink for that price. Although the John Hancock Center isn't quite as high as the Sears Tower, I thought its situation closer to Lake Michigan makes for a somewhat more interesting all around view than its rival's higher observatory.

Ric and I wandered north along the lakefront past sunbathers and beach volleyball players, bikes and rollerbladers and through Lincoln Park to the Lakeview neighborhood for dinner. Chicago's lakefront beaches nearly adjacent to downtown are quite unique for a large American city. And so what if it's too cold to use them for nine months of the year; how many other places can you be an urban beach bum right next to downtown's skyscrapers?

Ric and I made it an early night because we'd turn into pumpkins if missed the last Metra train back to the boondocks. We rode the El back down to the Loop and Union Station, and couldn't help bursting out in laughter as we were standing on the platform waiting for the El at Belmont Street. The wooden boardwalk platform and overall ambience reminded me more of an amusement park ride thana major city's mass transit system. American public transport now appears even more embarrassing than ever to me after recently riding the sparkling new subway systems in big Chinese cities.

Despite having grown up in and around New York, the city is still always a bit of an adventure for me, still somewhat chaotic even after Mayor Giuliani's big cleanup in the 1990s. With my big pack on my back and wide brimmed hat on my head I looked like anything but a New Yorker for the short Subway shuttle ride between the Port Authority bus terminal and Grand Central Station but nonetheless became a magnet for every foreigner in within hearing range of the last one I just gave directions to - a young Australian woman wanting to know how to get to Shea Stadium for the U.S. Open, an older Chinese lady who couldn't figure out the ticket dispensers, three German backpackers who needed to get to Grand Central, a West Indian guy uncertain if he was on the train in the right direction to Brooklyn. The list goes on. What is this? Did someone hang a sign on me this morning that says "INFORMATION BOOTH"?

Adirondacks State Park is the largest state park in the country and more than twice the size of Yellowstone. In reality, though, the park is a patchwork of public and private lands, wilderness areas and limited development more like the National Forest system than the National Parks. Nevertheless, with the possible exception of Maine's north woods, it remains the wildest and least populated expanse in the eastern U.S. Although I'm inclined to think of the Adirondacks as mountains, the reality is that most of the region is fairly high but not especially mountainous plateau on which the lakes are a bigger draw than the peaks.

We made Lake Placid our center of operations for the weekend. My Bro and I have somewhat differing views on how to live and travel, so my suggestion that we stay at the state run campground in Ray Brook was overruled because Doug was going through a rough time and wanted a real bed for some good nights sleep. So we stayed at the Maple Leaf motel, a single-story "old school" park-in-front-of-your-room kind of place within walking distance of the restaurants and watering holes of downtown Lake Placid.

Lake Placid was the location of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics and is a somewhat more upscale resort than other towns in the region. The town and its surroundings are peppered with the Olympic facilities like the bob sled run, Olympic skating rink and indoor stadium, and the downhill ski slopes at Whiteface Mountain. However, with recent Olympics held in big cities like Vancouver, Torino, and Salt Lake, I look at Lake Placid and keep wondering, "How could such a small town host such a big event?" The town, though, has an attractive setting beside Mirror Lake and is quite lively in summer with more businesses on main drag now than I recall even from my last visit two years ago.

Doug and I also look at food a little differently. As acquaintance of mine once told me, why spend a lot on food when it all comes out same place? Now don't misinterpret my views - I like good food and go to town with it on my foreign travels, but with restaurant prices in America as they are I prefer to make my fancy food myself at home.

"Hey Bro, how about the barbecue joint next to the state campground? I ate there two years ago and they have good selection of beers on tap." My suggestions again got vetoed each night in favor of establishments with good wine lists serving northern Italian cuisine. Our most memorable dinner was at a restaurant on Main Street named Milano where the "Pappardelle Alla Spezzatino Di Vitello" I had was unique and inspired, almost a creamy version of Veal Scallopini with artichokes, spinach, and sun dried tomatoes over homemade pasta.

First day hike was to Giant Mountain, 4,626 feet at the peak and one of the most easterly mountains in the High Peaks region. The High Peaks are the 46 mountains over 4,000 feet in the eastern Adirondacks, of which climbing all is a regional challenge akin to how Coloradoans treat summiting the state's 54 "Fourteeners". There are numerous routes up Giant. The Ridge Trail we took involved a fairly steep 3,000 foot ascent over 3 miles, but with much of the climb on exposed rocks with open views of the High Peaks towards the south and west this was one of most beautiful and enjoyable hikes I've done in the Eastern U.S.

Our second day got off to a late and somewhat rough start after a late Saturday night out on the town that included a few too many libations. We decided on a shorter hike up Ampersand Mountain. Located a few miles southwest of Saranac Lake town with a rather elevation of 3,352 feet, Ampersand Mountain involves a 5.4 mile roundtrip hike and a fairly steep 1,800 foot climb. With a rocky peak nearly bare of vegetation and situated between the High Peaks to the southeast and the string of Saranac Lakes appearing like topaz splotches in an evergreen sea, Ampersand Mountain has some of the best views in region.

For a change of pace we rented a canoe on Sunday to traverse the 15 mile route from out put out on Upper Saranac Lake through Middle and Lower Saranac Lakes and back to Saranac Lake town, a self-guided tour that took most of the day. The three lakes are connected by dammed rivers, each with free a state-run lock for motor boaters and lazy canoers like us who'd rather ride the water down a few feet in the lock than get out and portage the short distance around them. On trail and on the water our conversations weave back and forth from the personal and introspective to the serious and intellectual and then on to base "South Park" like chatter and back again. The lake shores we passed varied from near wilderness to vacation havens dotted with summer cottages and the famous Adirondack camps. It was a long day, but with being on the water and working out our upper bodies instead of our legs for a change, it was also a very refreshing one.

Tuesday was our longest day and involved a long 11-mile loop climb of Algonquin Peak, the second highest mountain in New York at 5,114 feet. We went up the long way via Marcy Pond to enjoy the very fun trail up and down ladders, over boulders, and along the granite cliffs of steep sided Avalanche Lake. After another mile or so to Culden Lake it was a then very steep 2,000 vertical foot slog up to the saddle between Iroquois and Algoquin and finally an easy scamper above timber line to the peak. I actually found the view from Algonquin Peak to be somewhat prettier than that from the slightly higher Mount Marcy, which both of us had climbed on previous trips. By the time Doug and I got down the mountain and drove the 6 hours back to New Jersey we were both feeling pretty beat but agreed it was a spectacular active weekend in the hills.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses what must be one of the country's finest and most comprehensive art collections. It's certainly not as large as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art but compares well with almost any other art museum I've been to in the U.S. My particular interest this time was an special exhibit of Latin American colonial era art called "Tesoros", but I was also eager to see the very controversial statue of Rocky Balboa that had just won Art Commission approval to stand in a shady out-of-the-way spot just below the museum's main entrance.

Don and I ended up having dinner in South Philadelphia's Little Italy, some new territory for me. Just as New York's Little Italy has dwindled to a string of Italian owned businesses and institutions along Mulberry Street as Chinatown has burst its boundaries, South Philadelphia's Italian merchants and restaurants are located in a neighborhood that now seems predominantly Latino. We had a pretty decent Italian dinner, but Little Italy's real fascination for me was in its gourmet Italian food markets.

While there are many Brits, Australians, Americans and other native English speakers teaching English in China, they cannot possibly meet the demand for English language instruction. Thus, many of their students eventually become English teachers as well. I met numerous people on my travels in China I could barely understand who told me they were English teachers, and I am sure many of them must moonlight translating signs. Here's some of their work.

One of Macau's superlative is that it is served by the world's fastest catamaran hydrofoil ferries which travel back and forth to Hong Kong as frequently as every 10 minutes during busy times for the 45 minute 60 Km ride. The ferry terminals on both sides resemble the international arrivals of major airports in which you must go through customs and immigration to get a separate passport stamp as if it were an entirely different country. The Hong Kong dollar is accepted nearly everywhere at parity with local currency named the Pataca, but I still managed to come by a few coins for my collection. It is also funny to still see all signs in Macau in Portuguese, the language of its former colonial power but one now spoken by few of its residents or visitors.

If Hong Kong's motto is "Shopping is Everything", Macau's must be "You Must Play to Win" because it's become the Las Vegas of Asia with Macau's gambling earnings now surpassing those of Las Vegas. Gambling was permitted in Macau under the Portuguese and over the last several years the Chinese authorities have allowed American gaming companies to open casinos, breaking the local monopolist's control over the industry. The recently opened Sands Macau now claims the world's largest casino while the Venetian Macau was about to open later during the month of my visit on Taipa Island, just one of several mammoth hotel casino projects under construction. In a true Vegas style a large pedestrian shopping complex is under construction on reclaimed land near the ferry terminal and Sands Casino with different streets in architectural styles copied from cities around the world - Venice, Amsterdam, Ancient Rome, Salvador, New Orleans, Miami Beach, Lhasa, and Beijing. I may dislike shopping but do occasionally dabble in it; the closest I come to gambling, though, is wandering across the casino floor to watch other people lose their money.

I expected Macau to be an elegant European style city with largely Portuguese architecture, but barring a few beautiful churches and historic monuments like forts, homes, and barracks around the city center, Macau is a very densely packed and thoroughly Chinese city, some of it a bit old and shabby but much of it modern in the new style of most Chinese cities. The historical relics of Portuguese rule are what get Macau its UNESCO World Heritage listing, the most famous of which are the ruins of Sao Paolo Cathedral, once the most important Christian monument in East Asia and the neighboring Fortaleza do Monte which also houses the Macau Historical Museum. I thought the prettiest place was the city's old central square named Largo do Senado.

Macanese food is completely different from other food in China, mostly Portuguese with a mix of influences from Portugal's other colonies like Malacca, Goa, Africa, and Brazil. As well as different flavors, Macanese cooking uses more European styles of preparation such as grilling, stewing, and roasting, rather than Chinese forms like stir-frying and steaming. One local speciality that has caught on throughout China is Macanese custard tarts, available at every KFC and McDonalds from Beijing to Hong Kong.

I would have only two meals in Macau, so I decided to choose very carefully. For lunch I chose Solmar, a very traditional local restaurant where I had African Chicken, supposedly the most typical Macanese dish. The very large half chicken was stewed in a delicious spicy, peppery sauce with tomato, garlic, chili, and cilantro, an almost Caribbean mix of flavors that was most definitely neither Chinese nor Portuguese. For dinner I splurged at a very Portuguese restaurant named A Lorcha on Caldo Verde (Portuguese kale, potatoe and chorizo soup), Portuguese Style Clams (flavored with garlic, wine, and chorizo), Pasteis de Bacalhao (deep-fried salt cod fritters), and a Macanese take on Seafood Paella.

Shopping is usually one of my less preferred pastimes, and I take pride in not having been into a mall in America in nearly two years. But in Hong Kong even I was able get into browsing in the markets for the fun of it and the bargains and wandering through the malls to take in their opulence and enormity (but mostly to enjoy their air conditioning).

I decided to spend a day of my trip in Kowloon, the tip of the mainland peninsula directly across the harbor from the central business district on Hong Kong Island that's Hong Kong's shopping central. First, though, I thought I'd take in a little culture at Hong Kong Museum of Art, part of a cultural complex of several museums and a performing arts center situated on the harbor at the southern tip of Kowloon that prove culture in Hong Kong is not only something that happens to pearls. From here in Tsin Sha Tsui, Nathan Road, shopping world, runs for several miles directly north through Kowloon, beginning first with massive malls to its west along the waterfront, outlet stores crowding the side streets to its east, and knock-off goods shops and custom tailoring businesses run by South Asians filling the old tenement "mansions" between the big hotels catering to spendthrift people on shopping holidays.

Beyond the large and pleasant Kowloon Park, Nathan Road and its side streets quickly become far less tourist-spending oriented in the tightly crowded tenement neighborhoods of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok where the shopping is more market-oriented, the customers more local, and the bargains more common. There seems to be a different street for everything, sometimes in shops lining the streets and in many cases on this Saturday in street markets - an entire street dedicated to jade shops, another to jewelry shops, a jade market house in several buildings with hundreds of stands, a street dedicated to wedding outfits and other bridal items, a street and market complex for computer hardware and software, and another for CDs and DVDs. One street market several blocks long is informally called the "Ladies Market" since it stocks mostly womens' clothing and accessories, while the Temple Street Night Market near the Tin Hau Temple is unofficially called the "Men's Market" for a similar reason. Even more interesting are the side streets devoted to animals and plants, one street specializing in dogs, cats, and other pets, another known as "The Goldfish Market" in pet fish and aquarium supplies, and a green area known as "The Bird Garden" entirely devoted to song birds, favorite pets among the Chinese.

I decided to go back to the Temple Street Market after watching the evening fireworks over Hong Kong Harbor. Night markets are common in Southeast Asia but I haven't seen many in China other than those specializing in food. Anyway, it was crowded and chaotic as is to be expected with lots of cheap clothing, Chinese bric-a-brac, useless knickknacks, and lots of interesting stuff that you forgot you needed until you saw or that would make ideal gifts - pretty chopstick/place mat sets, optical equipment, CDs, travel alarm clocks, bathing suits, camping gear, etc.

After all that shopping I realized I was not only hot but also hungry, so was easy prey for one of the street restaurant touts who lured me to an outdoor table with an English menu. Hmmmm, whelks, I've heard of them and I know they're some kind of a mollusc, but what are they? I guess I'll try some whelks (whatever they are) and the stuff the people next to me are having looks really good, so I'll make a piglet of myself and have that too - scrambled eggs with big shrimp and scallions, a chili crab, steamed pomfret with scallions and ginger, and greens with garlic sauce. Oh, and a big beer to wash it all down! All was well except for the whelks, which must be like the escargot of the sea. Essentially sea snails, their flesh long brown spiral-shaped flesh came out of their spiral shells with the aid of a toothpick and tasted slimy and chewy and gritty and slightly bitter all at the same time. Blech! I made it through seven of the twenty-odd shells that must have been in the bowl before I felt the taste and texture would be forever imprinted in my memory and I no longer needed to torture myself. Now for another beer to wash the taste out of my mouth!

There are other specialty markets and shopping streets in other parts of Hong Kong, some of which are located in the Sheung Wan neighborhood on Hong Kong Island just west of the CBD. Hollywood road specializes in teas, antiques and home furnishings, Lascar Street (alias Cat Alley) in religious items and bric-a-brac. More fun, though, are the shops along the side streets around Bonham Road which stock dried seafood products like seahorses, shrimp, shark fins, sea cucumbers, scallops, and seemingly hundreds of other products that come from under the sea. Similar are the areas full of shops stocking traditional Chinese medicines. Now these are the true sights and smells of China!

More sights and smells are to be found at Hong Kong's neighborhood "wet markets". The Cantonese have the reputation even in China for eating just about anything and preferring their food absolutely fresh. Thus, the multi-story markets in all parts of Hong Kong have an unusually large number of still live edible fauna for sale, ranging from fish, crabs, shrimp and other seafood in tanks and pails to frogs, chickens, and ducks in small cages. I goy yelled at by one merchant for trying to photograph some turtles, probably not legal for sale, and was quite shocked to see fish lying sliced in half on ice with hearts still beating.

This being Hong Kong, the peak tram terminates for one's "shopping convenience" (as stated) in a multi-story shopping mall named the Peak Tower, through which one must navigate five levels of stores and escalators to get to the free viewing platform at the top. I just don't know what I'd do in Hong Kong if everyone weren't so concerned about my shopping needs.

Then on Sunday morning I decided to do the touristy thing and take a local double-decker bus across Hong Kong Island to Aberdeen for dim sum brunch at Jumbo Floating Restaurant, one of several huge boat restaurants anchored among the yachts and sampans in Aberdeen Harbor and served by water taxis that run continuously from the docks. Dim sum is the one of the best known forms of Cantonese food and typically showcases the delicate, subtle, and refined flavors characteristic of Cantonese cuisine, and I was eager to try a wide variety of the little morsels because I had previously only eaten one dim sum meal in my life (in Vancouver).

Fortunately, because Jumbo is such a touristy spot, my waiter was able to remove the veil of mystery of what was moving around on the dim sum carts for me. I thought I'd stay away from the snails, the steamed pig's "huge intestine" with black pepper, and the stewed beef tripe in satay sauce, among other unappetizing-looking dim-sum delicacies and go mostly for things in presented in pretty little packages. I settled on six dishes I thought would give me a good mix of flavors and textures - 1) steamed dumplings filled with pork and jellyfish in shark's fin broth, 2) steamed seafood dumplings with wasabi, 3) steamed jumbo shrimp dumplings, 4) baked shrimp and smoked duck meant puffs, 5) baked barbecued pork pie, and 6) steamed rice noodle role filled with scallop. My dim sum were all delicious and quite different from the typical Chinese breakfasts of congee, cold noodles, pickled vegetables, and spicy-salty soup usually served in hotels. Interestingly, the steamed dumplings' contents in these Cantonese dishes were all visible through the semi-transparent rice noodle wrappers, in contrast to steamed dumplings in northern China in which the fillings are always buried deep beneath a thick layer of wheat dough.

I continued my Sunday on the south side of Hong Kong island by taking the bus to Stanley, one of several rather remote seaside villages on the south side of the island that cut off from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong by the islands mountain range and are popular abodes for expats and Hong Kong's wealthy. In addition to beautiful views, two small temples, restaurants, and a small shopping mall, Stanley has one historic colonial building, Murray House, that was dismantled to make way for the Bank of China building downtown and reassembled on the other side of the island, now housing an interesting maritime museum. However, Stanley is best known by tourists for Stanley Market, a large covered market selling knockoffs of designer brands that's absolutely packed with status-conscious Westerners searching for a cheap find that will demonstrate their standing in some small way when they return home. As you may have guessed, I didn't stay there long.

Between hiding from thunderstorms, I continued spent the rest of the afternoon hiking back from Stanley over a headland to the beaches at Repulse Bay and Deepwater Bay, beautiful spots without too much overdevelopment but (like everywhere in Hong Kong) well served by public transportation. Only a few miles from some of the most densely packed real estate on earth, the south side communities and beaches felt almost like tropical paradises.

Lantau is Hong Kong's largest, most mountainous, and least populated island and seemed to hold enough attractions to warrant a daytrip. I don't usually write about my experiences in a strictly sequential order, but this turned out to be such a great day that I thought I'd describe it in the manner of the "Perfect Day" form so popular in travel publications.

To get to Lantau I took the Metro through Kowloon and part of the New Territories and then across the world's longest road/rail suspension bridge, built to Lantau for rapid transport to Hong Kong's new airport in the late 1990s, to Tung Chung village, a highrise new town near Chek Lep Kok International Airport. After browsing around a huge new factory outlet shopping mall adjacent to the Metro station, I hopped on the nicest municipal bus I've ever been on for the ride across Lantau mountainous spine, along the island's tropical southern coast, and then 1,500 feet up a spectacular mountain road to the sights of the Ngong Ping Plateau.

Ngong Ping is a high flat area between mountain peaks on two sides and hilly slopes rolling down towards the South China Sea in the other directions. It's the site of the Po Lin Monastery, the largest temple in Hong Kong, overlooked by the Tian Tau Buddha, the world's largest statue of a seated Buddha, constructed way back in the 1980s. The three-course vegetarian meal at Po Lin is described as a must so I figured I'd give it a try, envisioning myself sitting on the floor dining among wise monks discussing religious philosophy, only to find myself eating mediocre tofu and mushroom-based dishes in a cafeteria setting surrounded by hundreds of tourists.

I decided to go for a wander from Po Lin to perhaps wander part of the Lantau Trail, a hiking path the runs the length of the island over its highest peaks, but the sultry heat and humidity got the better of me. After checking out the Trail of Wisdom, a rather new trail of more than 30 of Buddha's sayings inscribed on halved tree trucks erected on a hillside, I settled on a ralatively level hike around a peak with speactacular views over the International Airport and the Pearl River Delta towards Macau. Despite this being crowded Hong Kong, I only passed two other people on the two hour hike. I'd love to return someday in a cooler season to hike more of the spectacular highland trails throughout Hong Kong.

Next I took the bus down the mountain to the far end of Lantau Island and a small fishing village named Tai O, described as the Venice of Hong Kong, where most houses are built on stilts along canals. A tout talked me into a taking a short boat ride through the canals and out to sea to view local pink dolphins. This wasn't really a "swimming with the dolphins" type of experience, but I did see a few dolphins, which for all I know could have been pink plastic buoys placed there by the boat tour operators, but I can't complain for a price of $20 HK (about $2.50 USD).

I made my friend of the day while sitting on a bench enjoying the sunset over the harbor. An old man named Chung sat beside me and began chatting. Chung had lived in Tai O all his life, where he had been a fisherman in his younger days. He told me about life under the Japanese occupation in the 1940s and how little Tai O had changed over the years even as Hong Kong had changed. In response to my question about how Hong Kong had changed since reverting back to Chinese control, he said that most people in Hong Kong are not political and little had changed, that people distrusted the Chinese government but also never had much affinity for the British colonialists. As the minutes until my bus's departure were deindling, Chung changed the subject to the hand fans he pulled out of his bag. I knew those kumquats he offered me weren't just a friendly gesture! But since Chung seemed like a nice man, I bought two fans from him anyway under the condition that he throw in a bag of his kumquats to seal the deal.

As dusk was falling I took another bus to the ferry terminal at Mui Wo, where I had dinner at a waterside table at an outdoor seafood restaurant overlooking little fishing dinghies in inky black Silvermine Bay, enjoying the salt air while adding my shrimp, clam, crab, and peanut shells to those already strewn all over the floor. My return to Hong Kong Island was on the open back portion of a ferry that was nearly deserted except for a large group of Christian missionaries from Michigan and Indiana who sang hymns like "They'll Know We Are Christians", "Amazing Grace", and "I Trust In The Lord" the entire way back. They were all very friendly, even to a sinner like me who had had a couple beers with dinner, and invited me to join in, an unexpected end to a great day in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is said to be one of the half dozen or so most beautiful cities in the world that have that rare combination of urban landscapes, mountains, and seascapes, other contenders frequently making this somewhat subjective list being San Francisco, Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, Istanbul, Sydney, and Cape Town. Having been to all but two cities on that list, after seeing Hong Kong I think I'd give it the edge, as its blend of city, land, and sea views are more stunning than any other place I've ever been.

At least from a distance that may be the case, but as with any city when you get up close into its crowded, noisy, and hectic streets, Hong Kong is no longer the paradise it appears from high on the mountain or from a boat in the harbor. Shanghai and Beijing may be bigger, but Hong Kong feels like its people are all packed more densely on top of each other than any other place I've ever been. While the nearly 7 million people that reside in its 400-plus square miles don't suggest an especially high urban density, the fact is that the vast majority of its acreage consists of parkland and near wilderness while nearly all the people are housed in small rabbit hutches in the sky in massive highrise buildings, either in the glossy "new towns" built since the 1980s in the New Territories towards the Chinese border or in older highrises in Kowloon and the north shore of Hong Kong Island. And from street level many of those highrise apartment buildings dating from two or three decades ago have a very cheap and somewhat decaying projectlike appearance.

I feel like I received a firsthand experience in Hong Kong highrise population density through my accommodations in the Wang Fat Hostel which I booked over the Internet through the Hostelworld.com site I usually use. Located within a block of an MTR station exit in the very crowded and commercial Causeway Bay section of Hong Kong Island, Wang Fat consists of a number of converted apartments on a couple floors of a highrise building. My lodging budget didn't get me as much in Hong Kong as it did on the mainland and after about two nights I figured out that the room I was sharing with two other young travelers was in an apartment that was actually inhabited by a local family with children who mostly stayed behind other closed doors.

Despite the cramped accommodation and the crowded environment, it felt pleasant to be in a thoroughly modern place with a first world feel to it again. Among the small pleasures of Hong Kong was being able to go to Starbucks and sit and read a slew of English languge newspapers, rather than only the propagandistic China Daily like on the mainland. Other than some material comforts, however, there are few similarities between Hong Kong and home. Honk Kong is the virtual antithesis of the average American city, almost an anti-L.A. Whereas America is a land of privacy and isolation where people live (or aspire to live) far apart from each other in big suburban McMansions each with its own bit of front and backyard countryside, travel down freeways sequestered in their SUVs, while limited park land and public amenities fo underused, people in Hong Kong lead an entirely alternative lifestyle. Lacking much private space in their tiny skyscraper cubbies, getting around almost entirely using mass transit, and packing their pedestrian zones, malls, restaurants, and public parks throughout the day, Hong Kongers live out their lives in the public sphere.

Hong Kong probably has the most efficient and well integrated mas transit system I've seen anywhere in the world. One puts money onto an ""Octopus" fare card valid for all forms of public transportation (and even some other goodies such as McDonalds and 7-11), and the fare amount is deducted each time you enter and scan the card. Meanwhile, a reviewable electronic record is kept of all card use. In many places in the world getting on a bus requires a certain amount of faith and luck, faith that the number of the bus you were instructed to get on by another person or your guidebook will actually get you to where you want to go and luck that you actually find the right place to catch the bus. In Hong Kong, however, the bus routes are so well marked at every stop that not only is every route's terminal destination posted, every stop in between is listed with a map as well. Thus, there are rather few cars on the road in Hong Kong for such a large population, a real pleasure compared to the hellish sea of automobiles one is always surrounded by in America and so many other parts of the world.

Hong Kong has rather little in the way of historic or cultural sights for the visitor and is probably as much a town for partying now as it was during the Vietnam and Korean War eras when it was the big spot for American GI's R&R. As well as a healthy stream of travelers, Hong Kong has a huge resident community of western expats that make it an especially fun city to spend some time in.

After my touring I went out on Friday evening for a late happy hour in Lan Kwai Fong, an area of several streets of restaurants and watering holes catering largely to beer-loving Brits and Aussie travelers and expats. I ended up at an outdoor table at a local brewpub named the Hong Kong Brewery where I spent the rest of the evening talking with a group of young Americans and Canadians who all worked in Hong Kong. As I met more and more of their friends through the night, Hong Kong natives as well as Germans, Australians, Brits, Filipinos, and Thais, I couldn't help but think the life of an expat in Hong Kong looked like a really good one.

I was in Hong Kong shortly after the 10th anniversary celebrations for Hong Kong's return to China. Hong Kong falls under China's "one country, two systems" policies, so it's not entirely clear how much things have changed over that decade. As an American I don't need a visa to visit Hong Kong but mainland Chinese face restrictions and require visas to visit; one still passes through immigaration and gets a passport stamp when crossing between China and Hong Kong (thus, I consider H.K. a separate country for purposes of my count); Hong Kong still has its own currency which can not be used interchangeably with the Chinese Yuan; and vehicles still drive on the left in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was also previously always a colony rather than a democracy, so it's not clear to me how much has changed politically, and economically it would appear that little has changed in Hong Kong as China gradually evolves to look more like Hong Kong as it adopts capitalism.

West Lake in Hangzhou is one of the biggest tourist attractions for Chinese people, with a multitude of historical and literary associations as well as classical Chinese beauty. But how impressive can a lake with a 7-mile circumference surrounded by a modern boomtown be, I wondered. Now that I've seen it, I understand - it's absolutely lovely. With clean water and pristime lotus-filled ponds, ancient causeways on the lake, beautiful landcaping and classical gardens, temples, pagodas and museums, ancient steles and modern statues along its shores, West Lake is a place surreally perfect in a way one would never expect of China, one where everything that surrounds it is polished to a shine and there are no signs of the impoverished street vendors, wash lines, roadside rubbish, or floating debris that are so widespread elsewhere. Ultimately, neither the crush of the crowds nor even the searing 40*C (104*F) heat that created sweat stains on my shirts that looked like Jesus's face on the Shroud of Turin when they finally dried were able to quash my enjoyment of West Lake.

The same is true of for my hostel in Hangzhou. My accommodations in China were a mix of hotels and hostels. Whereas in Europe $25/night ($40 in London) gets you a bunk in a hostel in a room with at least three other people, in most places in China is gets you a private room in a fairly basic hotel or hostel, so I mostly stayed on my own. In Hangzhou, though, I decided to go the shared room route for $6/night so I could justify spending more on the cuisine I described in my Shanghai to Hangzhou/Eastern Food entry. The Ming Garden Youth Hostel must be one of the most beautiful and atmospheric places to stay in China, almost like a boutique hotel, built fairly recently but built in a traditional style with white walls, black tiled roof, stone courtyards, and wooden balconies. It is also ideally located on one of the causeways just off West Lake and surrounded by peaceful gardens and lotus filled ponds.

When it's as hot as it was through eastern China, no amount of water seems capable of eliminating thirst, but Chinese beer is able to do the trick. At between 2.3% and 3.1% alcohol concentration, Chinese beers seem to have mostly a hydrating effect, the drinker feeling sick and bloated from the volume of liquid long before feeling much effect from the alcohol. At least that's the effect Chinese beer has on me and was my poison of choice in China since neither Chinese wine nor spirits are very palatable.

I have to say that I find much new development in China to be silly in a Las Vegas sort of a way. In Hangzhou I wandered into an exhibition (real estate showroom) for Guangshia Tiandu New City, to be built northeast of Hangzhou in the "Parisian Style" of architecture with a mini-Eifel Tower and a chateau on a hill surrounded by vineyards. Similarly, the urban planning exhibit in Shanghai featured new satellite cities to be built in the Spanish, Venetian, and Nordic styles, while on the outskirts of major cities developers are also building closely-packed American-style suburban houses in very poor imitations of Georgian and Tudor styles, apparently all designed consistent with principles of good Feng Shui. I can't help but wonder what's wrong with native Chinese flourishes in residential architecture; why must upturned eaves and dark tiled roofs be confined to shopping malls and hotels?

I spent my second full day in Hangzhou in the hills west of West Lake in and around a large complex of several temples and a rocky hill that together make up one of the main attractions in Hangzhou. The lower slopes of Feilei Fang Mountain are covered with Buddhist sculptures dating from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, the most important rock carvings in southern China. Meanwhile, Lingyin Si Temple is one of the biggest temple complexes in China and an important pilgrimage (and tourist) spot. I was starting to get my fill of temples, though, and found the somewhat more distant village of Longjing and its surrounding tea plantation covered hillsides to be more enjoyable for quiet walks in the countryside. Longjing Tea is supposedly China's finest (or maybe just its most expensive), but my tastings at a local teahouse and a the Chinese Tea Museum honestly didn't win me over.

For reasons I do not understand, in China it is only possible to buy a train ticket in the city from which a journey originates. So figuring "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", I bought my ticket to Hong Kong more than a week early while still in Shanghai even though it meant returning to Shanghai from Hangzhou to catch the Shanghai-Hong Kong express.

With my "soft-sleeper" compartment I have now experienced three of the four levels of travel on Chinese trains (soft and hard seater, soft and hard sleeper), and from what I've heard "hard sleeper", with its bunks stacked three and four high in open cars rather than compartments, is not an experience I'll weep over missing. Soft sleeper, with fou rlinen-covered beds per compartment is comfortable enough, but there's nothing necessarily soft about it. Like just about all beds in China, this one feels like a thim layer of foam padding over plywood for which not even months of sleeping on a thin pad on the ground in a tent prepares you. Maybe hard beds build character; I can only hope.

The train passed Hangzhou again by nightfall, and when I awoke it was heading south somewhere in southern Hunan Province, passing in and out of numerous tunnels through a lush mountainous environment. This was a more traditional Chinese landscape of green hills, small villages, flooded rice paddies, multitudes in wide conical hats stooped over in the fields, and even a few water buffalo. With frequent larger towns and occasional factory smokestacks and cooling towers of new power plants, even this region was far from a picture-postcard view of old China. Except for the few days I was on Putuo Shan, China seems to be covered by a perpetual haze, how much of which is due to natural moisture in the air and how much is the contribution of man made pollutants is not entirely clear to me.

Traveling into Guangdong province, the landscape became ever more tropical in appearance with banana plantations and palm trees all around. The last couple hours to the border with Hong Kong were past the skyscraper boomtowns of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and Shenzhen in the huge industrial region around the Pearl River Delta.

For me Putuo Shan came not only as a welcome respite from the frenetic pace of the big Chinese cities I had recently visited but also from the months of travel through mountains, plains, and desert in land-locked countries. There are many people I know who don't consider it a vacation unless they're on a beach, but I realized on Putuo Shan that in my two trips across Asia totalling almost nines months of travel over the last two years this was the first real beach I was on. (The frigid Baltic beaches I walked on briefly in April hardly count).

If you've glanced at some of my latest pictures you might be wondering what happened to me. No, I did not decide to become a Buddhist monk. I went to a barber shop in the village on Putuo Shan where things all went horribly wrong, resulting in my head getting shaved. I don't know; maybe it's just the only haircut they know how to give on this island of monks. I always wondered how I'd look with a crewcut and how I'll look if or when my hair all falls out. At least it will grow back.

I spent my days at Putuo Shan hiking along jungle trails to some magnificent sea view overlooks, climbing stone staircases in the mountains to some seriously holy temples, and relaxing on secluded beaches. One morning I was on 10,000 Step Beach, a wide sandy beach with bath tub warm water and no one else within a couple hundred yards of me, when I smiley monk of perhaps 30 years old, in a golden robe and a haircut like mine, wandered by and sat down beside me. The monk spoke no English, so I could understand none of his chatter, and as far as I could tell he little of mine. He seemed very friendly, drew some characters in the sand with his toes, and wrote some characters down on the pad I was writing on, which were all, of course, also meaningless to me. I thought it was quite an interesting experience to be chatting with a Buddhist monk on a quiet beach on a holy island off the Chinese coast, so I thought I'd record the moment. My monk refused, however, when I motioned toward my camera to ask for his photo.

As the attempted conversation continued, I realized that through his gestures towards his heart, my genitals, his genitals, his hands folded beside his tilted head, and his motions toward the thick shrubbery behind the beach that the monk was trying to speak the universal language of love, and I was being propositioned for sex. "Look dude, no photo, no lovin'," I told him, but he seemed to understand neither my joke nor the "No" message I was trying to convey through such means as vigorous right-left head shake. I thought it best to get up and continue on my way when the lustful monk started stroking my furry leg the way one might pet a cat. I noticed as I wandered away that the forlorn monk went down to the waterside; I hope the poor thing wasn't so distraught over my rejection that he'd try to drown himself in the sea.

I guess I didn't learn my lesson about talking to mirthful monks. About two hours later I was wandering around Fayu Temple Complex when another smiley young monk, this time dressed in a maroon robe but also with the same haircut as me, said "Ni Hao" (rhymes with a cat's "MEOW") and started showing me around. The monk named the gods and goddesses as we wandered around the temple, and I followed his lead, folded my hands, and kow-towed before the statues where appropriate, even putting a few yuan in the collection box while I waited patiently for him during his prayers. After touring three buildings this way, my new monk friend seemed quite upset when I wouldn't accompany him into the next stop on his temple tour - the mens' restroom. I tell you, those monks aren't all as innocent as they look!

I don't seek casual encounters when I travel any more than I do at home, but these two incidents raise the following rhetorical question: Would having sex with a Buddhist monk be a very big sin or an especially holy thing? Please discuss it amongst yourselves and let me know what you conclude.

Probably the most spectacular sight on Putuo Shan is the 100 foot gold-plated statue of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy who protects fisherman and other seafarers, situated on a headland at the southern tip of the island. Putuo Shan is the center of the cult of Guanyin and the spot where the goddess is believed to have attained enlightenment.

However interesting the temples are with their statues of gods and monsters, scent of burning joss sticks, and pilgrims bobbing back and forth in prayer in front of representations of the Buddha, it's during ceremonies that the temples really come to life, especially on Putuo Shan where there are a couple thousand resident monks and nuns. The solemn procession and ceremony I attended at Huji Temple, located on the highest peak on the mountain, involved at least 100 buzz-headed monks in long maroon robes, some old and some young (and perhaps some not as innocent as they looked), chanting and banging discordantly on drums and gongs. It sounded to me more like they were trying to wake the gods from their slumber than to worship them.

I ate a couple of my meals on Putuo Shan in the restaurant at my hotel where I was waited on by a friendly college student from Henan Province named Han who was working on the island for the summer. Han gave me many pointers on which menu items were best and freshest each day and had a myriad of questions for me each time he returned to my table, to the point that he twice got yelled at in front of me by his supervisor to get back to work. I guess it must be more fun to talk to the rare foreigner on the island than serve soup to rich Chinese people at a banquet. Unfortunately, however, I was unable to give Han any tips on what he'd need to do to immigrate to America.

It was Saturday and the rate on my hotel room was about to quadruple for the night, so I figured I'd spend the morning on the beach and take an afternoon speedboat ferry to Ningbo for the night. The boat ride was through a pretty landscape of bays, islands, and peninsulas, many connected by impressive new suspension bridges, pretty at least where the green mountains have not been blasted apart to create more level land for container ship ports, shipyards, oil refineries, and highrise housing complexes. By the looks of all the enormous oil tankers waiting to dock, Shenjiamen must be a major oil importation port.

Ningbo is another prosperous business center at the confluence of several tidal rivers with ultra-modern skyscrapers and a flurry of new construction. It does not have much in the way of attractions, though, so for me was only a night stop on my way to Hangzhou. Coincidentally, the hotel I wandered into for a room near where the shuttle bus from the port dropped me off was across the street from a hostoric Portuguese church and not far from Ningbo's "Bund", a huge riverside entertainment center with restaurants devoted to every cuisine from around the globe, Irish bars, a German beer hall, English pubs, day spas and nightclubs. Indian food has never tasted quite so good to me.

Eastern style food tends to use rather few spices but makes good use of sweet and sour flavors, abundant seafood, and baking and braising techniques that aren't used too extensively in other regional Chinese cuisines. Being near to the ocean but also criss-crossed by canals and dotted with large lakes, it's no wonder Shanghainese cuisine prominently features seafood, with both ocean and freshwater varieties of fish, crab, shrimp, eels, and molluscs often constituting half the dishes on the menu. If price is any indicator, the head must be the best part of a fish, since so many high priced dishes have fish head as the main ingredient. It wasn't the season for Shanghai's famous hairy crabs, but I did try a few other local favorites including something called "Lakefood Soup", a thick seafood soup made entirely from freshwater fish, crustaceans, and molluscs, Bok Choy with Crab Sauce, and "Squirrel Mandarin Fish", a whole fish whose flesh is cross-hatch scored, then lightly battered and deep fried whole so it puffs up, served with a sweet and salty sauce.

I found a rather nice small restaurant just off Nanjing Road (the main pedestrian shopping street in Shanghai) that had a fully translated menu with lots of pictures, a very fortunate thing to come across. English translations of menus usually feature some great Chinglish and are often hilarious, other times just strange. For example, this place featured:

Chengdu Saliva Chicken

Jellyfish Head With Radish

Salted Duck Gizzards

Homely Bean Curd

Stewed Hairtail

Grilled Bullfrog

Dork, perhaps a miraculous Chinese cross between something that goes "Oink oink!" and something that goes "Quack quack", makes many appearances of Chinese menus, as do "Lamp" and "Crap". Meanwhile, other dishes listed on Chinese menus leave you wondering "What on earth could this possibly be?" Some examples from the same menu include:

Thickened Black Mass

Joss Stick Spinach Murmur Meat

Living to Explode the Shan to Carry on the Back

The Hair Blood is Prosperous

Hunt Eight to Kick Football

Frailly Skin Seafood Winding

Black Hot Pepper Cowboy Bone

Meat Floss Salad

Delicious Soup in Marmite (this made me wonder if the Chinese found a culinary use for that salty black British sludge named Marmite that's always stocked on Dragoman trips)

I decided to have "The Grandmother Meat Braise in Soy Sauce Style" because I've never easten grandmother before. Grandmother turned out to be surprisingly tender for such an obviously old animal, came covered in the same sweet, sticky brown sugar/soy/vinegar sauce as many Shanghai dishes, and tasted remarkably like pork (which is what I think it was).

The menu at this place was so much fun and the prices so reasonable I decided to return again, this time for "The Stem Burns the Whitewater Fish", a whole fish cooked with the same sauce as the grandmother meat with a few chili peppers thrown in, and Razor Clams (called Shenson) in a spring onion and ginger sauce.

The entertainment continued for me a few days later on Putuo Shan when I discovered such seafood delicacies as "Deep Fried Couch" and "Steamy Big Muscle" on a menu. Although common elsewhere too, it seemed that every restaurant on Putuo Shan had an adjacent garage-like room filled with tanks and buckets full of all types of fish and molluscs and underwater creepy crawlies from which the diners pick their own meal. "Hey, the fish that arrived on my plate was smaller than the one I picked out in the tank. No Fair!"

Th eastern style of cuisine typical of Shanghai and the coastal islands is also characteristic of Hangzhou. Nevertheless, like many places in China, Hangzhou has some of its own local specialties, foremost among which is local West Lake Carp in Sweet Chili Sauce, made with carp raised in Hangzhou's West Lake. Better yet is Hangzhou Beggars' Style Chicken, a whole chicken that's lightly salted, wrapped in lotus leaves, and baked in a clay covering.

On a night with an especially auspicious full moon over West Lake, I decided to got to the lakeside Lou Wai Lou ("Tower Beyond Tower") Restaurant, Hangzhou's most famous eating establishment, to try a few more of the local delicacies for which it is renowned. Lou Wai Lou was founded in 1848 and is a place where important people in Chinese history ranging from Sut Yat-Sen to Zhou Enlai frequently entertained their guests. The menu was full of such interesting-sounding dishes as Smoked Duck Tongue, Steamed Goose Liver, Dried River Eel, Preserved Jellyfish, Boiled Turtle with Chinese Herbs, Double Boiled Snow Frog in Papaya, Hairy Crabs, Wild Turtle, Treasure Crab, and Fried Gingko. Some of the exotic but intriguing concoctions containing birds' nests, abalone, sea cucumber, and shark's fin had some appeal but were a little too rich for my budget. After studying the menu for so long my waitress lost interest in me and assumed I must just be sitting in the restaurant to enjoy the air conditioning, I finally decided on my personal menu de Degustation:

Shaoxing Wine (a strong brown fortified wine similar to sherry from the nearby city of Shaoxing)

Traditional Fried Goose Liver (my first foie gras ever - what's all the fuss about?)

Deep Fried River Eel With Shrimp (good fish but I've had my fill of the syrupy sauce it's covered with)

Dong Po Style Braised Pork (pork belly in sweet sauce with some delicious morsels of meat between the fat)

Hangzhou Beef Soup (thicked with cornstarch and a bit sour and peppery)

West Lake Lotus Roots (cold and candied, a lot like sweet potatoes), and

Fried Celery With Lily Bulb (quite adventurous since I thought lily bulbs, at least the varieties Iused to grow in my garden, are mildly poisonous. I survived)

Pudong, though, is not only the downtown business district of incredible skyscrapers directly across the river from the Bund. Beyond the first row of skyscrapers stretch miles of brand spanking new city with a spacious, controlled orderliness that contrasts greatly with the frenzied atmosphere in the older parts of Shanghai.

While it sometimes seems like half of China is under construction, nothing prepares you for the airplane window like view over Shanghai from the observation floor of the Jin Mao Building. The spectacular new skyscrapers in Pudong and elsewhere in Shanghai are almost all crowned with unique tops resembling turrets, spires, crowns, sails, grills, fans, and other forms of ornamentation, in contrast to American skylines dominated mostly by the mid-twentieth century rectangular glass boxes of the International style. Unlike the so-called post-modernist style that has caught on in the U.S. since the 1980s, Chinese skyscrapers borrow nothing from historical styles either. Perhaps the type of otherwordly futurism that has overtaken Chinese cities will one day be looked upon as something characteristically Chinese.

Pudong is an urban planner's dream and an opportunity for them to exercise creativity on a monumental scale, and as someone who likes to draw up designs for fantasy cities a dream of mine as well. As far as I can tell, though, Pudong's designers were influenced by existing cities, most notably Paris and London. Although different in its modernity, Century Boulevard, Pudong's central axis which extends several miles southeast from a park surrounded by skyscrapers near the TV Tower, resembles an unfinished Champs Elysees, ending at a large perdestrian plaza on the same axis. This plaza lies between the enormous Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology and a glass exhibition center and somewhat resembles the axis of La Defense outside Paris. This axis ends a short distance further at the very large and meticulously landscaped Century Park, a recreational center with fountains, lawns, serpentine lakes, and an amusement park, which is surrounded by highrise commercial and posh residential areas and bears some resemblance to London's Hyde Park and New York's Central Park. Still farther to the southeast are the Expo Center where the 2010 Shanghai World Exhibition will be held, the Shanghai Technology Center, and the MagLev train station to the airport.

I was tempted to pay the modest admission fee at the enormous Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology, as much to see more of the building as to view the exhibits it houses. However, the 5,000 screaming children I encountered around the T-Rex and Brontosaurus fossils in the lobby were about all my nerves could take, so I limited visit to the fantastic Pan-Asian food court on the first floor.

Just for kicks, though, I decided to take the MagLev train to the airport. Shanghai's maglev is the only functioning train of its type in the world, hovering over its track through a system of magnets, and also the world's fastest at a top speed of 431 km/hour. Traveling at an almost jet plane like speed at ground level had all the thrill of a roller coaster ride. I had no real business at Pudong Airport but thought I'd take a look around what is destined to become the world's busiest airport by 2025 (if you are inclined to believe what the exhibits in the Urban Planning Museum say) while I was there.

Sprawled for about a mile along the left bank of the Huangpu, The Bund is Shanghai's historical financial center from its first heyday as East Asia's most important commercial city in the decades before WWII. The buildings facing the waterfront and several blocks inland were also the center of European influence in Shanghai during that era, and its hotels, banks, and government buildings are largely in the Art Deco style. Although on a much more human scale than most of what surrounds it, the Bund's architecture and historical importance are entirely overwhelmed by the modern city of Shanghai; it struck me that the interest of nearly everyone strolling the raised pedestrian promenade along the Huangpu and on the cruise boat I took was focused not on the Bund but on the skyscrapers in Pudong and several blocks back on the Bund side of the river.

The Bund and the nearby shores on both sides of the river are also where plenty of tacky tourist-trap crowd-pleasers are clustered, ranging from the Chinese version of Ripley's Believe It or Not museum to Insect World to the "Bund Tourist Tunnel", the last of which I made the mistake of riding through since it was faster and cooler than waiting for a ferry across the river. I have to admit that my curiosity was piqued, though, by the Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture and Health, and I forked out a few Yuan to check it out.

In my wanderings along the Bund, on Nanjing Road pedestrian shopping street, and in Peoples Park and other destinations frequented by foreigners I was starting to get very wary of friendly people in Shanghai. The only friends I was making were those trying to separate me from some of my money. I think I had been approached 2,318 times and asked, "Meesta, want to buy watch? Rolex - looky, looky! Mont Blanc pen, bag, shoes, polo shirt!" by touts trying to pull me into stores selling luxury brand knock-offs, approached 446 times and asked, "Meesta, where you from? Meesta, I asked you where you from - Germany? Canada? Sweden?" by pretty young women trying to scam me into attending an expensive tea ceremony with them, and approached 283 times and asked, "Meesta, you want massage? Sexual massage? 100 Yuan! You want girls?" by sex trade touts. I haven't been approached so aggressively by the sex industry since I was in Bangkok in 1996.

Bangkok is also the last place I ever felt as hot as in Shanghai. Throughout my stay in eastern China, the region was suffering through a heat wave that kept humidity high and temperatures in the upper 90's farenheit and me in a constant sweat-soaked state whenever I was outside. It was so bad I began to wonder if a fungus might start to grow on me the way it does on those tree sloths that live in the rainforest. I experienced much higher temperatures when I was based in Egypt, but the twenty-degree hotter dry Saharan air felt nowhere near as uncomfortable as Shanghai's steamroom like air.