Girl, resumed

So how did I spend my first anniversary of a cancer diagnosis? In China.

It was a work trip--I accompanied 76 MBA students (with several faculty & staff colleagues, too) to Shanghai, where we spent 5 days meeting with companies from Starbucks to APL shipping and 2 days seeing the sights. Shanghai is like a few New Yorks piled on top of each other: busy, bustling; horrible traffic (less volume than LA, but much more insane); and, from what I hear, more construction cranes than in the rest of the world, combined.

It's a shopper's paradise where you can get North Face jackets for about $18 each, and knock-off Birkin bags for about $40. A one-hour foot massage that was the best of my life was about $3.50. About halfway through, I began feeling really, really guilty about the guys who were sitting there giving the massages. When I pay $3.50, you know he is getting at most half of that (and probably less) for his hour's great work. And Starbucks--which is all over Shanghai--still charges $4 for a latte. China is getting rich on the backs of its poor. The gifts I bought for people are pretty much all handmade, because labor is still cheaper there than machinery. I could hardly stop purchasing, but there's definitely a guilt factor involved. And for all the great service we got everywhere, there's not even a custom of tipping!

Shanghai is not traditional China; we made a brief visit to SuZhou, nearby, and that was much more quaint and old-fashioned. Still, Shanghai has great energy and a breathless feeling of hastening progress. It was exotic and invigorating, and everyone we met was looking forward with a lot of hope. As a place to mark my first year AD, it was perfect.