Ameeeeeeeeeeeerica

So, one 13-hour flight, 5-hour layover, 2.5-hour flight, and post-flight-travel-arrangements later, I'm sitting in my hotel in Austin. Being home is ... surprisingly normal. I was wrong about it feeling strange. The novelty of seeing familiar faces was good but lasted for only a short while. Now I feel, well, I live here. I suppose that's a good thing. That I can feel so comfortable so easily in two very disparate locations :-)

Sunday was nice. I ate lunch with Kevin. We went to Curra's, this fantastic Mexican establishment on Oltorf St. Then we went to my old apartment to see my old roommate/landlord. I took a tour of the place to see what he'd done with my old room and studio. They're looking nice. The three of us spent a couple hours just bullshitting. I flashed back on the fact that I lived there for two years. Relived some moments. And kept telling myself that I've only been gone for 6 months. Sometimes it feels like a short amount of time; other times it feels like it's been much longer.

Afterwards I picked up a copy of The Onion (whose RSS feed, for whatever reason, doesn't work in China) and the Austin Chronicle and set out for Mozart's to read in the late-afternoon sunshine. It was wonderful. I felt compelled to buy a Mozart's t-shirt to wear around Shanghai and hopefully identify fellow Austinites ;-) Then Shawna and some of her friends and I ate dinner at the Hula Hut. Then we went back to her place to play Wii bowling, and I totally would have won the second game (turkey!!) if a thunderstorm hadn't interrupted us by cutting out the power. I claim victory nonetheless :-)

I didn't sleep at all on Sunday night. Literally, not at all. I alternated between lying in bed awake and reading. At 7 AM I decided to get up and partake of my hotel's "breakfast" (consisting of hard bagels, bananas, and coffee). Then I headed into work.

Work has changed in many ways. Many people have left, and we've hired many new people as a result. So, there are many strange faces, both on my team and around the rest of the building. That is inevitable though in any organization. Still, when someone I know leaves NI, it always shocks me a bit, because it's like, disrupting a small part of my known universe ;-) My team is sitting in a different location than before I left (and likely will be in another spot when I return for good). Some of the cafeteria workers appear to have left also.

But by and large, many of the familiar faces I left are still here. I spent a good long while walking around to my former teammates and saying hello. Then I gave a lunchtime presentation to many of them about Shanghai and the Chinese language. It felt good. I was really nervous about doing it, but I think it turned out okay.

I also didn't really think about this, but I came home at a good time. We have off work on Thursday and Friday, so I only have to use my brain for three days this week ;-)

This morning I was up at 3:45 but I didn't mind because I went to bed around 8 PM, so I feel that qualifies at 8 hours of sleep :-)

Speaking of sleep, this is a sleepy little town. I always thought of Austin as a rather large city, because it was the largest I'd ever lived in. But compared to Shanghai, this place is a piddling little backwater truck stop. Driving along I-35 I saw the Frost Bank Tower, the (now second-)tallest building in Austin, and was like aww, one single 33-story building. "It thinks it's a city! How cuuuuute!" Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. One reason I enjoyed Austin before is its nice blend of big-city nightlife and culture with a relaxed small-town vibe. That appears to be intact. It's just that I have a different perspective now -- I'm used to some insane hustle-and-bustle.

I'm Living in a Spaceship

Last night my parents took me to dinner at Epicure, the revolving restaurant on the 45th floor of their hotel. INSANELY expensive, of course, but far far below what you'd probably pay for a comparable night out in a place like NYC, LA, or Chi-town I'd imagine. Just one of the bonuses of living in Shanghai -- sometimes you can pretend you're a rich industrialist. Muhahaha.

Anyway, aside from the great food, the opportunity afforded me the chance to snap some incredible pictures of the neon apocalypse that is the literal and figurative heart of Shanghai: The People's Square / Lujiazui interchange.

As always, click a photo to be taken to its page on flickr (and subsequently view related pictures).

For your perusal:



The close-up building on the right, outlined in blue, is the Shimao International Plaza, which I like to call the "Batman Building" (you'll see why if you click the link). The lit-up street leading into the distance is Nanjing Dong Lu.

Further back, the lit-up spire in the upper-left of the picture is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. From there, across the picture to the right, is a taller building with the triangular top lit up -- that's the Jin Mao tower. To its right, not lit at all (since it's still under construction) is the World Financial Center.

Another view, from 20 floors below:



Here's another view where you can see the buildings a bit more clearly, as the photo was taken earlier in the evening:



Here's what it all looks like in the daytime:



Back to the neon. Here's my favorite: a zoomed-in view of the pedestrians on Nanjing Dong Lu on a Friday night.



Here is the same scene viewed at ground level:



Perpendicular to Nanjing Dong Lu is Xizang Zhong Lu (Central Tibet Road). It looks like this:



The large building with "Capital Land" at the top is Raffles City Plaza.

And here's another high-up view: this time of the Shanghai Museum (small yellow-lit building) and the, well, I'm not entirely sure what the other building (in green) is.



Notice the lone non-lit-up building in the lower-right, a model of restraint! I think this is the Shanghai municipal gov't building.

As always, you can see these and more pics at my photostream.

Many of these pics are blurry at their original size. The reason is that a) I have shaky hands, b) lack a tripod, and c) when taken from a revolving restaurant, pictures with a slow shutter speed (like 1/2.5 th of a second) will blur by default :-) But some of them came out really nicely, regardless. And if you think these are blurry, you should see the ones I didn't upload to flickr :-)

The new camera is holding its own even though it has some UI deficiencies relative to the DSC-H1. For example, on the DSC-H50 there's no way to instantly review the last picture taken, a feature I really liked on the old model. On the H50 you have to switch into 'Playback' mode. And for some reason, although pictures taken vertically (with the camera held sideways) auto-rotate during playback mode -- which is great -- but they download to my computer as un-rotated. And when when I manually rotate them and place them in the flickr uploader -- the manual rotation doesn't come through. (I still had to do manual rotation on the DSC-H1 -- but those settings were preserved in the flickr uploader.)

Strange. But these quibbles are terribly minor. (I suppose that was redundant.) In every way shape and form, this camera kicks serious ass. I can already see the increased image quality in the pictures I've taken just this week. Sometime soon, possibly tomorrow, I plan to get a tripod and then map out some nighttime shooting locations for even MORE neon insanity!!