My
severely myopic road buddy is 15 years my junior, but she's still
able to keep up with me. Back in the summer of 2008 we had begun
making arrangements for a trip to Spain, when her eye condition
worsened and required a procedure called epiretinal membrane peeling.
The procedure required the fluid in the eyeball to be temporarily
replaced with a gas until the new fluid, little by little, replaced
it.
That
put an end to our plan to fly to Spain because it was verboten to fly
for a month after the surgery—something to do with the
incompatibility of aircraft cabin pressure and the gas in the eye.
Although it was not stated concretely, I had visions of the eye
exploding out of its socket and splattering on the wall of the cabin.
We
were, naturally, disappointed in our aborted trip to Spain. As a
consolation prize, we flew to Shanghai instead after the month was up
and the natural fluid had filled the eye cavity—and we didn't have
to worry about scraping the eye off the cabin wall. Blech!
So,
the meaning of the title in the previous post. We were having our morning coffee recently
and she said maybe it's a good thing that we are 15 years apart. We
can still travel before you get too old and I get too visually
impaired to do so. So, bad macabre joker that I am, I laughed and
said: “Terrific, the crippled leading the blind!
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Nanjing Road shopping street |
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traffic jam, what else? |
Except
for a trip to Hong Kong some 26 years ago we had never really been to
China. Hong Kong was still a British territory at the time. So going
to Shanghai the year China hosted the Olympics in 2008 was our first
(and so far only) trip to a China emerging onto the world stage—like
a Phoenix rising from the ashes—as it has done so many times in its
long history as a coherent nation.
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Pudong across the river |
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tai-chi in the morning |
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family outing |
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Daishijie - our subway stop |
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yum-yum dim sum |
Shanghai,
as you might expect in a “developing” country, was a city of
contrasts from the towering skyscrapers and business bustle of
Pudong, to the back alleys of the neighborhood our hotel was in where
people still bathe and do laundry in the street. People gather in
parks and do tai-chi in the morning and haggle over the price of tea
in the market—and wonderful Chinese food (and others) to die for.
Where a young fellow graciously helped us to find our hotel when we
were hopelessly lost. Where I had a “Margarita Supreme” in a
place called Zapata's in the old French Concession the size of a
goldfish bowl for practically a song. Where a little girl whose
mother sold flowers in the street saw me carrying a McDonald's bag
(with only hot coffee inside unbeknownst to her) and grabbed my arm
trying to get what she thought was a hamburger and wouldn't let go.
[I would have given it to her if it had been a burger.] A city,
indeed, of contrasts from extreme conspicuous wealth to a hungry
child in the street. Sounds a little like America these days, come to
think of it.
Photos taken at Yuyuan Garden in old Shanghai
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lotus and carp pond |
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tea house in the garden |
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window framing the garden |
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ubiquitous "moongate" |
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undulating dragon wall |
1 comment:
that was a wonderful trip for me, as well, my friends….
R
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