Your side of the great firewall again, dears, in London to be specific, in Pain Quotidien to be specific, on my way up to Yorkshire and pregnantly overstuffed on pretentious baked goods after five weeks of Shanghaiese food. By the time I left Shanghai some, oh, 24 hours ago, it was really time to leave Shanghai . . . the air was so dirty I was worried about long-term damage to Ren (who's blooming, by the way), the traffic was so bad that I was risking pulling a Falling Down, and I did not get fluent in the language all of a sudden. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that everything is going to seem pretty bland and colourless and odourless for awhile after those five weeks in Shanghai. Fuck me, what a city.
You get to appreciate there - or at least I did, but that could be because it's the core experience of people my age, who I was spending all my time with - that they had something like a year zero that didn't quite stick 40 years ago, but still did a vast amount of damage. There's this sort of dislocated older generation being taken care of/being unpaid nannies for their professional children who've got no time for anything except paying the way of their kids and parents at once. Even so, that place is so . . . so fucking Chinese. There you go. Adjectives fail me. Shanghai looks and smells and sounds like Shanghai and not like anything else. It's doing things Shanghai's way - not anybody else's. And since there are more people in the city than there are in Australia, it is so alive. I've never looked out a window, looked at any view in front of me there that didn't have a shitload of people in it. And that didn't smell like 14 or 15 things. Which was as disgusting as it was interesting at this stage of my pregnancy.
Anyhoo, more about Shanghai later, but now I'm back in Europe, and exhaustion notwithstanding very interested in the sensation of being back in Europe. Okay, I'm not really in Europe, I'm in London. But interested in it. I wonder how much I've been romanticizing my memories of the continent because of not liking Australia. Time to find out, I guess. I've only been here about an hour and a half and I've already spent a good 20 minutes of that cursing how the Tube is so fucking backwards in terms of disabled access (or in my case pregnant with two suitcases access) and how nobody gives me and my enormous belly seats on trains. They didn't in Shanghai either to be fair, but I assumed that was because people there didn't realize I was pregnant and thought I was just another fat foreigner. That excuse doesn't work here in the land of lager and pot noodles.
You get to appreciate there - or at least I did, but that could be because it's the core experience of people my age, who I was spending all my time with - that they had something like a year zero that didn't quite stick 40 years ago, but still did a vast amount of damage. There's this sort of dislocated older generation being taken care of/being unpaid nannies for their professional children who've got no time for anything except paying the way of their kids and parents at once. Even so, that place is so . . . so fucking Chinese. There you go. Adjectives fail me. Shanghai looks and smells and sounds like Shanghai and not like anything else. It's doing things Shanghai's way - not anybody else's. And since there are more people in the city than there are in Australia, it is so alive. I've never looked out a window, looked at any view in front of me there that didn't have a shitload of people in it. And that didn't smell like 14 or 15 things. Which was as disgusting as it was interesting at this stage of my pregnancy.
Anyhoo, more about Shanghai later, but now I'm back in Europe, and exhaustion notwithstanding very interested in the sensation of being back in Europe. Okay, I'm not really in Europe, I'm in London. But interested in it. I wonder how much I've been romanticizing my memories of the continent because of not liking Australia. Time to find out, I guess. I've only been here about an hour and a half and I've already spent a good 20 minutes of that cursing how the Tube is so fucking backwards in terms of disabled access (or in my case pregnant with two suitcases access) and how nobody gives me and my enormous belly seats on trains. They didn't in Shanghai either to be fair, but I assumed that was because people there didn't realize I was pregnant and thought I was just another fat foreigner. That excuse doesn't work here in the land of lager and pot noodles.
2 commenti:
It's a conundrum...no man in these parts would sit while you were standing (never mind the pregnant part...good to hear things are well in that department) but, we don't have any subways. You'd be driving everywhere anyway.
Bout time you found yer way back to the world.
Very sorry I won't be experiencing pregnancy in a place so notorious for its courtliness. Mind you Yorkshire is a pretty good too.
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