Stop! Somebody roll me into a taxi!

Being in China is always an interesting study in the power of the mind to forget good lessons learned: each year I come and go each year I say, "Next year, I'll find some way to arrange my trip for longer and ignore more of my relatives," each year I say, "This time, I won't let people bully me into eating so much," each year I say, "I will spend more time just walking around the city, and less in banquet halls questioning if my stomach is actually Mary Poppins' bag." Each year, these things fail to happen.

Shanghai is in a rush of building again, so the skies that were blue the last time I was here are gray and fogged over with excess again -- apparently the whole city is Really Excited (tm) about the 2010 World Expo. I haven't had the heart to report to them that nobody knows what that is, and maybe I'm wrong! Maybe everybody knows who that is other than say, me. Anyway, they're laying waste to vast swathes of the city, tearing limb from limb old houses with baked s-shaped roof tiles and squat rows of multifamily apartments tucked into one another like the knots along a Chinese staircase, banking the Suzhou River at the heart of the City. I've been here now...four days? And although we've walked along the business districts and eaten at all the finest restaurants and seen my -- shockingly old, now -- grandparents, I haven't yet walked along the Bund, wandered around the refurbished 1930s district holding an overpriced Starbucks coffee. I haven't spent time in People's Square, where the Shanghai art museum and a maze of stores and bakeries are crouched around enormous, German-sponsored shopping malls with hideous modern art displays in the lobby.

There's a lot left to look at and not much time left to do it -- which leads me to the inevitable Shanghai-related ennui, that sense of urgency that I love this city and don't have enough time to be here, which leads me to violent thoughts about my job and all my responsibilities and why don't I have employment here -- in Shanghai, which I like a whole hell of a lot better than Lexington Avenue or being trapped on the 5 line during rush hour traffic, my left boob jammed into a pole.

But preemptive sadness aside, I love it here and I wish I could stay forever.