China, in my hands

Drat, my Carol Decker fixation seems to be peeping through

It’s 1am and I’m awake because jet lag.

Social media doesn’t work here in the People’s Republic of China.

Neither does Google, and therefore neither does my catch-all email account.

But access to this website seems to be OK.

Anyway.

A six hour flight to Dubai, a couple of hours on the ground, and a seven hour flight to Shanghai, followed by an hour’s slightly scary ride in a very large, chauffeured BMW, led to a room on the 36th floor of this hotel.

Feeling peckish, and in need of something savoury, the early evening streets beckoned.

Choices ranged from walk in, sit down restaurants, to eating from a small table hanging off the back of a tuk tuk.

If the cyclists and mopedists didn’t kill us first.

I’ll pick up on the traffic in another post.

We chose a street vendor who was cooking some kind of fried dumplings.

He seemed aghast we only wanted six, but took our 55p (equivalent), wrapped them, and we took two pairs of chopsticks, and walked on.

In the noise and bustle of rush hour Shanghai we hunkered down on the steps of a shopping mall and tucked in.

They were *delicious*.

Some kind of boiling hot, shallow fried, sweet dumplings, filled with…

Well, we don’t know what they were filled with.

It seemed to be a herby-dressed, ground pork, or at least that’s my guess.

Whatever they were, they soon weren’t, and we were ambling about looking for a second course

Four satsumas (another 50p), and a slice of cake, with cream and apple in the middle, saw us right.

And then back to the hotel.

It was too dark to wheel out a camera, and record any images, but that’s what is in store for tomorrow.