This weekend I visited my friend Wendy in Shanghai. It was very very excellent! The food was increadible, the sights were pretty cool, and the city itself was extreamly facinating.

Wendy absolutely loves it there. She is from Singapore and loves absolutely everything Asian. Well, there is a city of 18 million, with a ton of asian stuff for her to enjoy. Her girlfriend Siobhan from Seattle was also there when I was there, so was that made it even more fun. Siobhan is there for 6 weeks! Nice. Wendy even had Siobhan taking chinese lessons from a private tutor the moment I got there... and Siobhan had only been there a week! How can you tell who's the butch and who's the femme in that relationship :)

The city was facinating. I could not believe the amount of people living in it. There were high rise apartment building for as far as the eye can see. Utterly amazing. But I did not find the streets to be the insane overcrowded places that you think it would be from TV. The subway was a little crowded for my tastes, but then I think I find London tube a lot worse at times, so not that bad. The only extreame overcrowding came when we took a short boat tour along the Bund at dusk when all the highrise building lighted up. I can't believe it, but 3 days was not nearly enough. I could have used another 1 or 2 days to do all I wanted. I needed to do some more shopping, as I didn't manage to find a x-mas present for my parents, or even pick up any tacky Mao stuff... damn. Oh well, definitely be some more asia trips in the near future.

The food was amazing!! Very very tasty. Some things were really really excellent! And then others were very similar to Vancouver. I guess I was expecting the food to be completely different, as everyone says North American asian food is nothing like China or eastern Asian food. Well... it's not all that true. Some things are very diferent for sure, but a lot of it were very similar to Vancouver restaurants. But still, it was very good. And off course we ate at the high end restaurants most days and they were not that expensive. They were not cheap though, probably similar to an average restaurant in Vancouver. The last day we ate at a "middle class" restaurant, and the food was just as good as the high end ones, and 1/2 price. I think Wendy wanted to show me the real nice places though, and they were pretty nice, so that was good.

Overall it was a very very good time. There were only two really big minuses. But I was expecting both of them any ways. The first was that it was way to WAY too HOT!! It was crazy hot and humid two out of three days. The third day (Saturday) was actually almost bearable and that was the day we did the most sight seeing, so that actually worked out real good. But Friday and Sunday were both crazy crazy hot hot HOT!! Oh well, can't be avoided it I guess.

The second bad thing is that we did a club night on Saturday night, hitting the two "best" gay clubs, and the clubs were pretty darn pathetic! They were both very very small and not all that exciting. We had one drink in the best bar & one in the best club in town, and they were both about the size of my old apartment in Vancouver! Very sad. So then we ditched them and went for Karaoke with some of Wendy's friends. Crazy, I could not belive it, but karaoke in China means not in a bar, but you pay for a little room where you and your friends go and then just sing to a wide screen TV? Bizzare! It was fun though, probably the best part of night. Although, I think we bugged Wendy's friends because we always wanted the english songs instead of the chinese ones. Opps! Oh and also the front of the karaoke place is really bizzare too. It's like a grocery store where you buy all the drinks you want and then take them into your private little room. Very different. Unfortunately, the videos I took of us all Karaoke'ing didn't quite work out very well, they never do in the dark.

All in all a very fun trip. My first trip to asia has definitely left me wanting more. Bring on Cathay Pacific all-asia pass!!