You move me —
You move me —
Open sea and city lights
Busy streets and dizzy heights
You call me —
You call me —

-The Analogue Kid

It’s 2AM, and my last night in Shanghai is drawing to an end. It’s hard to imagine that in half a day’s time my vacation will be over and I’ll be flying back to Taiwan. People say that when time flies when you’re having fun, but in this case it didn’t. This has been the best vacation I’ve ever had, and yet my two weeks here have felt more like two months.

After an enjoyable day of reading The Diamond Age, I met up with John and his wife and had some 火鍋 for dinner. Unlike most of the 火鍋 I’ve had before, it wasn’t buffet. Still, it was extremely good. Heck, I always love that kind of food. I also saw an interesting before dinner.

I arrived at our meeting place pretty early, so went walking around a bit. Nestled between skyscrapers, I found a relatively large Catholic church. The architecture looked like it wasn’t that far off of what one would find at home, or in Latin America. There were also some fountains in front of it. At the time, it really seemed like an amazing sight. In the middle of so many commercial buildings, in an area where I’d least expect it, was a a church. It was a nice looking one, too. I really wish I’d been able to get a snapshot of it. It wouldn’t have made quite the picture that the Starbucks in the Forbidden City did, but it would have been good.

After dinner, we went back to his place, and watched Ice Age 2- a pretty entertaining movie. Just as I was about to take off, I finally saw Lennet. I’d heard he wanted to ask me some stuff about living in Taiwan when I’d been staying at the apartment before, but he got back late every night and amazingly it was the first time I’d talked to him. I guess he’d lived in Taiwan before, but that was before he could speak much Chinese. Now that he speaks Chinese really well, he’s gonna move back to Taiwan. He was saying something about not letting the Taiwanese “corrupt his Chinese” or get rid of his ability to pronounce “zh”, “sh”, “ch”, “r”, etc… I’m really curious to see how it will go for him. I hope people don’t laugh at his “standard” accent.

Part of me doesn’t want to go to sleep. Right now, I know what’s on my mind. I know what I feel and I know what my plans are. By allowing myself to fall asleep, I’ll be yeilding control to my future self. Who knows how I’ll feel or what I’ll want to do tomorrow? Can I trust my future self to make the most out of my last few hours on the mainland? Sigh… now there’s a healthy line of thought. Bed, it is.

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