day one: of messuisses and monks

Waking up to a virgin city holds, for me, an unmatched joy. Stephanie describes the most tragic symptom of aging as the gradual loss of our sense of awe. If there's any validity to her selection, I'll know that I'm an old woman the morning I lay eyes on an unfamiliar sky, plant these feet down upon sidewalks or soils for the first time, breathe in a wholly new set of odors, and feel nothing. A secondary (and somewhat antithetical) satisfaction is the accompanying ambition to make this alien space mine, in time. Getting lost is wonderful in the sense that, in time, it'll never happen again. The process of becoming educated, and, ultimately, expert at a given endeavor - a game, a language, a musical instrument, a job - through physical practice is, in my esteem, uniquely fulfilling.
On Wednesday, I near-leaped out of bed a seven, and got dressed. I'd packed a light backpack and consulted a map the night before, and had chosen Mei-Luo Cheng - a bustling area of the business district - as a desirable destination.
**A word on writing in Chinese, in English - Mandarin morphemes, as delineated by the English alphabet, sound terrible. I'm can't speak definitively as to whether or not the language is 'beautiful', but crisp, erect sounds like 'gong', 'pau3', 'kan4' and 'ling2' wilt haplessly when pronounced in English. That being said, referring to proper nouns by their definitions is a paltry alternative - as anyone who's eaten at more than one Chinese restaurant knows, there's an obnoxious typicality naming: 'happy', 'lucky' , 'dragon', 'pearl', etc. I'll try, in any case.**
I took the subway (the sterile number 2 line) from Central Hill Park, which is nestled in the eastern axilla of what's known as the Inner Borough of Shanghai. Public transportation in Shanghai, I learned, has two salient benefits: 1) the plastic is valid currency for subways, monorails and taxi cab 2) subway and monorail maps and stations are not laid out like the New York City MTA, which made the trips mercifully simple. I emerged from underground, and it looked like this:

It became clear very quickly that electronics was the trade of choice for the shopping centers. Laptops no larger than six inches in screen diameter, thumb-sized cellular telephones, and mp3 players shaped like stars glittered from dozens of kiosks in matte silvers and neons. A feast for the eyes.
Two interesting things happened in Mei-Luo Cheng. The first was that a pair of monks asked me to accompany them to lunch. Experience shows that religious folk have generally harmless ulterior motives for stopping young girls in the street, so I obliged. They were very kind, and bought me lunch (at one of the ubiquitous KFCs). They preached, I listened, trying very hard to understand. They gave me a pretty religious keepsake, and their phone numbers. We parted ways.

Not long after leaving the monks, I was solicited by a man who claimed to be giving away gifts for a French spa brand. Experience in this department suggests that salon canvassers generally do have unsavory (financial) ulterior motives for stopping young girls in the street, but I was feeling pretty safe, given that I had zero dollars and about six inches on him, so I allowed myself to be solicited. I followed him into an edifice, where I was forcibly given a facial and a massage by a very nice young woman, who then demanded money of me. I had none, but I wanted the remainder of the massage, so I asked if she wouldn't spot me, promising that I'd return the next day to pay her back. This rather lame offer, delivered in accented Chinese, worked, for some reason, which made me happy, because I liked the idea of swindling swindlers. She asked for some collateral to ensure my return. I gave her my expired driver's license, which I had no intention of returning to fetch, and, feeling clean and refreshed and well-fed, carried on to a bookstore, where I picked up a dictionary, an abridged translation of Oscar Wilde stories, and some children's books, for practice.