Friday 2 July - Arrive in Shanghai

I arrived on Friday feeling surprisingly un-jetlagged having swapped seats with a strange Irish man who had a premium economy ticket, hurrah.  I found Lloyd waiting me for with a piece of paper with my name on it - living the dream!

We took a taxi back to his place; my first encounter with the roads of Shanghai.  They kind of have rules - people seem to obey traffic lights.  Trying to cross the road is more a matter of negotiation than anything else, and before long we had nearly knocked over some locals.  At crossings, cars will try to swerve around you in preference to stopping.

Having dumped my stuff, we went and registered me at the police station.  A slightly angry policewoman took my details, made me sign things, and then printed other things out on a dot-matrix printer.  It was slightly surreal, but I was glad to be there because of their fabulous air conditioning.  I didn't mention the heat, but suffice to say I usually look like I've just completed an hour of sports.  We then took a tour of the local area, and local tourist trap.

What followed promised to be the highlight of the day.  We walked five minutes down the road, and up a ramp to some shops.  Well, I walked up the ramp; Llloyd sort of fell up it.  We then walked into the place advertising massages.  It was just how you'd hope the place to be actually, very convincingly authentically Chinese, to my South London eye.  We swapped our shoes for the supplied slippers, which through some miracle almost fit.  We then went into a slightly darkened room and laid down on the massage tables.  The man was more thorough than I was expecting.  He did the back etc, and proceeded to the buttocks.  Lloyd didn't get his buttocks done, but did get his ears cleaned out with the girl's finger.  Apparently this is a really good place compared to most, really professional and no happy endings etc.  All in all, really good.

It was natural that the first meal we had was an Indian.  A nice one.  We then went to a Japanese bar to watch the first half Holland vs Brazil, and then an ex-pat one for the second half.  There was a drunk man with ten women; from what I could tell, each of a slightly different level of whoreyness.  We came back and watched a film : Crank.  It sounded OK until I found out Jason Statham was in it.