Nihao from Shanghai

I arrived safely after 27 hours of travel. Boston to Newark, Newark to Beijing, 6 hours in the Beijing airport, and then Beijing to Shanghai. I'm here visiting a lab sort of as a consultant on limb development. They are studying all things bat - echolocation, ecology, behavior, evolution, and one postdoc has recently started looking at limb development. They are excellent hosts, so I have a comfortable place to stay, tons of food, and entertainment around the city. Zhe and I went last night to the big shopping district, Nanjing Road, which is lined with little shops and huge department stores, and everything is lit up in blinding neon. We went into several little specialty food shops with sweets, liquors, chinese medicines, imported chocolates, and a meat market in the back. The meat market was the best. I saw flattened pig face. As in face skinned off of pig. Eyes and ears and mouth and nose. Flattened pancake thin. Awesome.

We went down one of the little side alleys to where there were some food stalls and just picked at a bunch of finger foods for dinner. Waffle-type pastries filled with red bean. Grilled pork wrapped around green onions on a skewer (mmm, food on sticks), sweet sticky rice, and tofu. Yeah, so Zhe says to me "the tofu smells bad, but tastes very good." I think "ok, maybe she doesn't like the smell of tofu." But it's not so bad. I like tofu. Let's have some. Oh noooo. We get a container of fried tofu doused in a red spicey sauce that tastes a lot like buffalo sauce, and she says to me "Smelly tofu." That's putting it politely. I would say rank cow manure-smelling tofu. As in it brought back vivid memories of going to the auction barn with my dad as a kid. I made it through one piece without gagging and then politely said "I think it's a little too strong for my taste." I'm a very adventurous eater. I've had blood sausage, sheep lung, and a lot of things I didn't even know what they were at the time. But this is one thing I just couldn't stomach.

So then we wandered down to the river which seems to separate the main part of Shanghai from the big buildings in the financial district. We got tickets for one of the cruise boats that takes you up the river and back to see the buildings from both sides which is quite lovely. This is the only place I've been where not only are the buildings lit up with neon down the sides, but two of them serve as giant advertising billboards. It was unbelievable the sort of detail these many-storied skyscraper TV screens could project. Aquarium fish in in vivid colors, fluttering cherry blossom petals.

And I held a bat yesterday. Hooray for that rabies vaccine :) This lab has three different species of bat in captivity, and Zhe let me hold one of the littles ones with tiny teeth so it couldn't do much damage if it got away. They're cute little critters...