Seem to have troubles posting directly to blog, so hope this one gets through. Shanghai's going pretty well so far, apart from my impending poverty due to lack of places that'll change $NZ. Maybe I should start a paypal donations or fill the site with full page ads. Hmmm....anyone got any products they want endorsing? SubliminallyDRINK COKE or otherwise? First impressions are mixed. The city's pretty spectacular, especially the Oriental Pearl Tower and the prices for most things aren't too bad. Wide range of food, great metro system so getting about's not a problem. On the negative side, the people aren't quite the friendliest in the world. I've been fucked about with once by some "friends" and almost sucked in by another. And that was just in the first day. Since then I've learnt to ignore any attractive women who want to help me just for the satisfaction of doing a good deed. It usually entails buying them dinner or them ordering the most expensive, scratch that, the most EXPENSIVE item on the menu. Lower case just doesn't do the word justice. I'm doing coffee with an ex-student of mine on Saturday. She's studying in Shanghai at the moment and was a nice person when I taught her in Jiayuguan. I just hope she hasn't become a Shanghainese good sarmaritan yet. Yep, I'm bitter and twisted about the Shanghainese. When I first came here I kinda expected people to be pretty decent. Okay okay, it's only the first few days and things'll probably change, but right now I'm pretty pissed off with a lot of people I've interacted with. First impressions and all that. Truthfully, since the first day things've been going a lot better, and walking around with my earphones plugged in prevents at least some of the Shanghai sarmaritans from trying to beguile me. On the other hand, considering the traffic, doing exactly that is probably a really bad idea. All senses need to be on overload just to cope with it. As in the case with most cities in China, there are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead. There's more poverty here than I thought there'd be, which was likely pretty naive of me in retrospect. You have the usual scruffy people rooting through the trashcans, but also, uh, differently normal population. That's really the only way I can put it without being grossly offensive even by my standards. The company seems pretty good so far, I actually got picked up at the airport for a start, unlike I did with a certain company in Taiwan. The staff seem really friendly, going out with them for a social thing on Thurs, so looking forward to that. Will post this now, my email account has been brainfarting since i came to China, so there's a possibility that this'll screw up and you'll be spared the horror of reading my prose.