Shanghai crab

It's the season for Shanghai crab, and I was lucky enough to be in Shanghai to enjoy a wonderful crab feast, thanks to two of my colleagues and friends there. We had a wonderful dinner with too many courses to count -- ten? twelve? -- ending with the delicious crab. And of course we had to spend many hours chatting and enjoying each other's company. It hardly even registers to me anymore that people come from a completely different country and culture, because we have so much in common. Of course, it's the social-economic class that has become more and more alike across Asia, and there are plenty of people out there who don't have access to the middle class.

I snapped the photos above from my taxi, and yes, I seem to spend a lot of time in taxis in Shanghai. The roads are a mess as they are being worked on in advance of the expo in April 2010. Coming from Tokyo, the taxis in China are a shock. The taxi has been modeled after the Japanese cab, with some attempt to reproduce the white doily coverings and the ubiquitous video screen, but in China it's all so grubby and the video screen blares with no way to change the volume, and the driver is encased in some kind of security bubble. Between the lurching, the fumes, and the blaring, I tend to get pretty sick by the time I reach the office.