If you like a modern, relatively clean city complete with a few nice museums as well as sit down toilets, then Shanghai is a great place to visit. Personally, with a few exceptions, I hated it. Shanghai is strikingly more modern and more orderly than Beijing. With order and cleanliness comes higher prices (about 2X). The architecture and street layout of the French Concession area was pretty cool, but it is French, so I will say no more:). The on...

More to come on Shanghai later, but I wanted to tell you about where I have been for the past couple of hours. I am sitting in a smoke filled Chinese internet cafe with well over 100 computers. Chinese teens and twenty something guys are yelling at one another while playing internet video games. Cel phones, cigarettes, and video games are everywhere. When they are not yelling at one another across the table or across the room, apparently it is socially ...