Published by Swiss James on 20 Aug 2007
RachelLynn
If you ever read the blog I wrote when I was in Korea, you’ll have seen the sentence
“Then me and RachelLynn stayed out until 6am and got hammered on soju”
written somewhere between 15 and 1,000 times.
Well RachelLynn is calling in on me this week, on her trip over land and sea from Seoul, South Korea to Vancouver, Canadialand.
So far she’s gone from Incheon to Qingdao and then taken a 19 hour, hard-seat train ride from Qingdao to Shanghai. Presumably it was on the crowded train that she caught the fever / flu that she’s still recovering from, which makes the journey pretty good value for money at 160 RMB.
In an effort to speed her recovery on Saturday night I got a blender at the weekend (thanks Craig!) and have been making fruit drinks packed with nutrition / Rum. Like Grandma always says, if a glass of Watermelon juice, crushed ice and enough Vodka to topple a Cow doesn’t fix what ails yer, you need a Priest not a Doctor.
She was well enough on Saturday to take a trip down to the Bund, the waterfront haven for tourists, pickpockets, hustlers and scallywags. If you like looking at tall buildings and being asked whether you want to buy a fake Rolex, you’ll LOVE the Bund.
This season’s collection
The weather was fantastic, clear blue skies, little fluffy clouds- everyone along the front was smiling in the sunshine. We took the ferry across to Pudong, sat on the terrace of Element Fresh and watched the last rays of dusk sink behind the old banks and insurance buildings of Puxi.
Sunshine brings out the umbrellas, downtown.
To get out of toytown and back to Puxi, we took the Tourist Tunnel; the world’s most pointless and brilliant tourist attraction. It’s basically a very slow subway ride of one stop, with an unexplained and inexplicable sound and light show along the way.
“Liquid Mag-ma” goes the voice, as red LEDs flash around your transparent monorail bubble
“Fossil Variants” it booms again, as green laser beams ping off my shiny scalp and take out a child’s eye. It’s disorienting, baffling and brilliant, if you can’t go in person, some kind soul has videoed it for you..