Happy birthday!

I turned 21 today! Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday messages - I miss all of you!
The attitude I've been taking with the food situation so far has been "order first, ask questions later." Until today I've been lucky and haven't recieved anything that looks like it did while it was still alive so I can always pretend it's chicken. Not tonight - those are frogs. The sight really grossed me out for a while, but I finally tried one. Not too bad, but not worth the effort for the little meat. Mark got his money's worth. Beforehand we saw fried duck hanging in the window of a restaurant - the WHOLE duck. It wouldn't surprise me if they throw these things in while they are still alive. Baba's cooking sounds realllly good right now...well, it always does.

One cool thing about the restaurant was the ordering system. The waiter came with a PDA-like device and sent the order to the kitchen wirelessly. Why don't we have those at home?

It has been quite an eventful birthday so far. Last night, Stan and I decided to explore some more of the city, so we headed in a random direction and walked for about 5 km. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me, but Stan did, he should be uploading the pics soon. The city looks really cool at night because so many of the buildings have incorporated LED :-) lighting effects (LEDs are all over the place - I love it). We followed one glowing haze after another and passed through one more high-business/shopping district with nice stores like Lacoste (more about this later) and the Ritz Shanghai until we found our way into an internet cafe on the fourth floor of a mall. This seemed to be a big hangout for people our age with a hundered computers and everyone watching movies. They had a server with any movie you could ask for a click away (and gigabit ethernet), all licensed of course. We looked up some places to go while we were there and saw a place called "Windows Too" that Stan had heard recommended before. We planned on taking a cab there so we wrote down the address. We didn't need to though because when we asked the girl we were getting pizza (3/10) from where it was, she walked us there. What are the chances in this huge city that it would only be a minute away? Or that someone would be nice enough to personally take us there?
Windows Too, I found out today from a SJTU student, is a really stupid name for the place. Apparently the word for "bar" in Chinese sounds like the number 98...as in Windows 98...duh. After Linux Too, I bought Mission Impossible 3 on DVD for 5 Yuan (~$0.65) and we walked some more until we ended up in a neighborhood with a massage parlor. After passing many of these on our walk, and with our feet aching, we were captivated and were drawn in by the door guy. An hour foot massage was only 6 bucks, but I was let down when my foot soak didn't come with the floating rose petals the picture had promised.

The lady in this picture was one of our "connections" yesterday when we went to look for some cheap brand name clothing. This trip warranted our first ride on the subway - another extremely smart design including doors so people don't fall into the tracks, and displays with arrival time (which were 30 seconds off). As soon as I walked out of the Subway on Shunxi Rd, I was greeted by "you want Rolex?". He led us to an alleyway which we were a little hesitant on stepping into. A few people were standing back there speaking to each other in Chinese so we couldn't understand their plan. I followed our "agent" (he even had a business card!) up into someone's house full of designer bags, watches, suits, sunglasses, and shirts. We bargained with them for a while but left to what else the alleyways had to offer. These guys really wanted our business and it was kind of scary when we were surrounded by them or when they would grab onto your arm. Eventually after an hour and 4 agents later we found the right vendor willing to sell us some nice shirts for 5 bucks. I would love to see the factory where they produce these things because there are thousands of them out there. The DVD factory must be a wonder too. Vendors everywhere are selling thousands of high quality printed (not burned) DVDs complete with a case and artwork for 5 Yuan.

I added a "Call me now" button that you can use to call my cell from your home phone - for free! Make sure you check out the photo album link on the right side. Lastly, thanks for the comments - keep em coming! Someone was nice enough to leave me a proxy that isn't blocked here to access blocked sites with.

6 hours of class today was a little rough, but now it's time to go out to Zapatos. Nite!