Can a city, or a place, be defined by a single object that a person carries in his arms — conspicuously, if not ostentatiously? Or at least, can you name an object like that that would tell you something unique about the city?

In Paris, it has to be the baguette. Zac was making garlic bread out of one today, which brought me back to some night not too long ago in Paris when someone chuckled that it was so like the stereotypical French person to be carrying around a baguette — on your way somewhere with a piece of bread. Because you have to be on your way somewhere, and because having a baguette under your arm while walking inevitably conveys the notion that you are going somewhere to do something with a very large piece of bread. And so we did it too, and we did something with the bread. I’m fairly certain we ate it. And for one evening, we were stereotypically, wonderfully, faux French.

In Shanghai, it was oversized plush animals. Not that it occurred at a rate anywhere approaching stereotypical, or characteristic of Shanghainese. But it happened enough that it seemed like a trend, if a weird one. The burden of a man-sized plushie on Shanghai’s crowded transit system just seemed too great — and yet there they were. Young to middle-aged women going somewhere to do something with a large, pink bear.

That was the point, I think. To show everyone on the bus how much you cared for someone. Enough to get them a large, pink bear at least. And enough to shoulder the burden of knowing everyone’s watching you. But you kind of want them to. Because in the poor but upwardly mobile world of Shanghai, it had to be a kind of exhibitionism. I can afford something useless and ostentatious like a large pink bear. Can you?

So what about us, Americans? Angelenos, or New Yorkers, or San Franciscans? It occurs to me that in this country, where the car isn’t just a vehicle that promotes individuality but is just as often a proxy for our individual identities, that we’re not going to find many arm-toted objects that could say something illuminating about ourselves. Instead, we’ll find them — bigger and better — secured to the back of a car on a trailer. Like a monstrous Eddie Murphy head on a roadshow, for example. The more disturbing question is: But what does something like that say about us?

Besides the fact that we’re going somewhere, to do something with an Eddie Murphy head.

If you’re still reading this blog, I’ll have to count you among my true friends. Or I should be thankful you haven’t cleaned out your RSS reader.

A few weeks after I returned to L.A., for the purpose of applying to an internship I furnished When in Roam as proof that I have a blog, but I qualified the attachment as languishing — the “plight of travel blogs whose authors return home.”

That’s what I did, and that’s what explains the silence. I returned home.

I’ll be honest. You missed out on quite a bit — an entire city or two, in fact. Blame it on burnout.

Beijing-bound
After several weeks bumming around in Shanghai, I realized with a start one characteristically lazy afternoon in Leslie’s apartment that I had less than a week remaining in China. With that, I grabbed my bags (and dutiful friend Karen) and hopped the fast train to Beijing. The fast train taking 10 hours and the slow train taking 12.

Little did Karen and I know, our farewell Papa John’s the night before in Leslie’s living room left us all with a little parting gift: some throat bug that spent a day or two sprouting tentacles in our systems.

After reaching Beijing, I touched base with Leslie, who with an appropriate amount of misery complained of a sore throat. What a coincidence; I had one too. Oh, and for that matter, so did Karen.

And so I spent my last few days in China trying to make the best of Beijing, a city I had never before been to. I had a choice: party hardy, or sleep well and get myself right. Turns out I mostly chose the latter. In fact, I was mostly better by the time I spent a day climbing the steep inclines of the Great Wall at Mutianyu — but that’s what did me in, again. I spent another day bedridden after that, swilling Gatorade and popping Tylenol capsules like Flintstone’s chewables.

Was it worth it? I’ll be PC and say yes. The truth was, the Great Wall was exactly as I had imagined it, and not particularly breathtaking for it. Nothing like the Grand Canyon, at least.

If anything, Beijing played the role of foil to Shanghai. Where Shanghai sometimes seemed overly concerned with how cosmopolitan it was — and by that I mean how many Japanese department stores it had — Beijing was the city with actual culture on the streets. I had heard the word “culture” bandied about before in association with Beijing, but I assumed people meant “history.”

It’s not just that. It’s young people. Young people. Who seem to enjoy dressing well, and hanging out, and doing things young people do. It’s old people too, with their pet birds (they take them for leisurely strolls in their cages) and the Chinese instruments they strum streetside on muggy afternoons. There was an unmistakable charm in some of Beijing’s neighborhoods — which makes it that much sadder that the government is so hell-bent on leveling these old places.

But that’s China’s story, and most of us know it chapter and verse by now.

On our last day in Beijing, Karen and I checked out of our hutong hostel and embarked on our respective journeys home: for her, a 10-hour train ride back to Shanghai, and for me, an 11-hour flight back to Los Angeles. I traversed the Pacific Ocean in the time it took Karen to get from Beijing to Shanghai.

Reflections from a moving train
And then I was home.

There was an appropriate but surreal parallelism to the way I arrived home, via bus and Metrolink, because everyone in my family was working and evidently couldn’t spare a day to pick up the one delinquent family member from LAX.

So, backpack strapped firmly to torso, I found myself riding a train again — in Los Angeles, of all places.

No cow-spotted landscapes outside or snow-covered woods. Look out the window of a Metrolink train bound for San Bernardino, and all you get is the rush of the 10 Freeway. There were no backpackers among the passengers, only weary commuters. They were going home from eight hours at work. I was going home from six months abroad. I shoved my way through them to get off the train, and after bravely bearing the burden of my things uphill to my mom’s new workplace at Cal State L.A., I put down my bags for the last time.

Until a month later, when I picked them up again to move to San Francisco.

Part Two: What Comes Around (Read part one)
Right by Leslie’s apartment building is a small supermarket that sells basic goods and vegetables that look like they’ve been run over by cars. In this supermarket works a short, weathered-looking security guard who loves to make conversation.

Leslie gave me some backstory soon after I got to Shanghai: Once the guard learned that Leslie was Taiwanese (“I KNEW you were Taiwanese!!”), he began to regularly prod her about Taiwan. Things like, “I don’t get it — what’s so great about Taiwan?” and “Does Taiwan have (insert something inane here)? … See, China’s better!”

So I had been warned. Chinese people sometimes have a chip on their shoulder about China’s supposed superiority, even if no one else is making any claims to the contrary.

Well, I guess I was. One day down in the supermarket, the security guard, who at this point knew me as an American, interrupted my shopping to ask me how their supermarket compared to those of the United States. Annoyed by where I knew he was going with this line of questioning — and at that very moment sighing at the market’s lack of selection — I decided to see how far brutal honesty would go with this man. After all, he asked.

“Uh … American ones are … better,” I said before strolling away.

He found me again: “They’re more or less the same, aren’t they?” he offered by way of unilateral declaration.

“American ones are bigger,” I said, for one thing, but not wanting to encourage him, I said nothing more. I strolled away again. (See? Casual.)

“We have big ones too!” he protested, raising his voice in my direction as I shrugged him off and left.

This last image is a good one to hold on to as you next picture me grasping the rim of a toilet bowl at 2 a.m. coughing and sputtering pink. This, and the puking granny of Louis Vuitton. Karma has a great way of teaching humility, or at least reminding you that what goes around does come around, or in this case, up.

I can offer some color on how it happened: I’d gotten sick like that only three times (knock wood) in my adult life. The two previous times were both in Taiwan, just last year. And viral gastroenteritis is contagious. Did you know? I didn’t. Leslie had become acutely ill the day before. The morning of the day after she got sick, I happily popped a piece of toast she had been too ill to finish into my mouth — by night I was foaming like a carsick dog.

Walking home with Karen, I spat into every other bush I saw. This is how, after seven days in Shanghai, I became Chinese and began spitting in public.

~

A few days ago I finally set foot in Shanghai’s Old City, which is oddly confined to an apple-shaped district in the city’s southeast corner. After accidentally wandering through a half-inhabited, half-torn-down street, I abruptly found Shanghai’s quintessential tourist trap: suddenly every building had curved roofs and curved tiles, and was painted a pleasant Chinese maroon.

After about two weeks on Shanghai’s alternating streets of relentless modernity and ramshackle 20th century poverty, it was like, I don’t know, walking into a time warp.

Only The Onion can adequately capture how I felt. Ironically, they’re jokingly describing a man’s accidental sojourn into New York’s Chinatown:

Unsure of whether I had mistakenly traveled halfway across the world or walked through some sort of mystic gate into another time and space, I found myself wandering without aim or purpose. For how long, I do not know, as the Rolex watch I had purchased during my ordeal stopped working almost immediately.

I do not know where this mysterious “Chinese Zone” came from, but there it was, in the middle of the city, like some bizarre “Asian Center for Commerce and Trade.” What it was called—this “Localized Community of Residents Originally from the Far East”—I haven’t the slightest idea, though no mere label seems capable of describing it.

And there it was. The Yuyuan Bazaar, full of Chinese snacks and knick-knacks and pretty Chinese-looking buildings, was like Shanghai’s Chinatown.

I don’t know why, but this odd revelation rounded out my experience of Shanghai. This is what Shanghai was missing. Over the next few days I eased into a rhythm here that in some ways echoed my five months in Taipei — free of obligations and full of food and companionship.

When Leslie wasn’t cooking, we’d eat out, or order in. Or I’d bring home pot stickers and Taiwanese root beer and pop in a pirated DVD I bought on the street. Every other night was movie night. And then one day I looked at the calendar and saw that I had a week left in China. My ambitions to travel to more remote parts of the country were dashed, and now here I am, two more nights in the city that I don’t want to let go of.

Funny, how things can turn around like that.

A story about karma should be structured like this: Part One, What Goes Around; and Part Two, What Comes Around. Let’s see how well I hew to this complex formula.

Part One: What Goes Around
I go back with Leslie four years, and with Karen a whopping 12 now. Leslie I met abroad when we both studied in Tokyo, Karen I met in high school English. Coincidentally, both of them moved to Shanghai within two weeks of each other, then ended up living on the same street, two blocks apart — this just a couple months before I was to visit Shanghai, so I anticipated a lot of fun exploring the city that was new to all of us.

Shanghai has long had a reputation for being the most cosmopolitan city in China — even more so than the capital, Beijing. In my mind it lived as a city equal parts Chinese and Western, a place modern and continuously morphing. The book I just finished, “When We Were Orphans,” by Kazuo Ishiguro, trades on the image of 1930s Shanghai as simultaneously sultry and crime-ridden. It’s a place where high rollers clink wine glasses in elegant halls while rickshaws drag by on the streets below, where the opium trade sinks Chinese society into a sick torpor while enriching the lives of the English. It’s a place where anything and everything happens.

With the above in mind, I was ready for modern Shanghai to be a dizzying, sensuous delight. With two good friends in tow, I was ready to explore the most outward-looking Chinese city. Having shaken off the events of the last century, Shanghai was eager to reclaim its place in Asia as the most diverse, bustling, wealthy, and sophisticated; it was where busy and sexy people would push past each other on the sidewalk between appointments, where the blaze of skyscrapers at night would rival Hong Kong’s. I was ready to hit the town with my friends to see China’s Tokyo, or London, or New York.

And then I got a bit of a rude awakening.

Our first day on the streets was educational. The Shanghainese, as Christopher Banks in “Orphans” also observes, feel no compunctions in shoving you aside in crowds, or on the metro. This wasn’t too different from my experience in Seoul, but there was something more gruff and insensitive in the shoving here, if that makes any sense. OK, China has a billion and a half people; I gave them the benefit of the doubt. But then every other guy on the street was shooting snot rockets onto the pavement, if not hocking loogies. Underwear hung on clotheslines in the public park. This wouldn’t have fazed me anywhere else in China, but in the country’s most reputedly cosmopolitan city?

There was a lot to be confused about. Neither my friends Leslie nor Karen could explain some of the wenhua chayi (“cultural differences”), as Karen calls them, but having had a couple of months head start, they could be slightly more blase about some jarring, if amusing, things.

Leslie related the mystery of the puking grannies. Why, she asked a colleague one day, does she see so many old people throwing up on the streets of Shanghai at 10 in the morning? Isn’t it a little early to be drinking? she pondered tentatively. She was walking on West Nanjing Road one morning and saw an old lady hurling prodigiously on the pavement outside a Louis Vuitton. (At hearing this anecdote, I burst out laughing, maybe too hard, too long — and subsequently, every time it was referenced again, I laughed again as if it was the first time I had heard it.)

Leslie’s colleague explained: they’re not drunk, they’re from small villages and they’ve never ridden in cars before. That’s where the bus stops, so that’s where they get off to throw up. “Sometimes you can see traces of vomit on the sidewalk,” Leslie said.

This was real cultural anthropology, I thought, and I had a chance to see the artifacts with my own eyes. I insisted Leslie point out traces of any pavement puke she saw. Meanwhile, the three of us went to Xintiandi, a reclaimed complex of shikumen, traditional brick houses that have been transformed with pitch-perfect yuppie sensibility into — what else? — an outdoor shopping mall.

Suddenly, we went from granny pants hanging in the park to a French bakery, overly expensive restaurants, and lots and lots of (I’ll say it) white people. The next day we visited Taikang Road Art Center, a tiny warren of alleys that has undergone a transformation from poor and rundown into cutting edge and hipster (sort of like New York’s Meatpacking District). Taikang, like Xintiandi, was bustling with an abnormal concentration of white yuppies trolling for exotic things like Western brunch, while a stroll 30 seconds out the edge of the main alley would have had you find a woman squatting on a corner cutting vegetables.

This sort of begged the question: has Shanghai changed between 1930 and now? Then too there was the International Settlement, and a divide between the well-to-do Europeans and the lower-class Chinese in the Chinese city. Has Shanghai reawakened to its cosmopolitan potential, only to invite back into its borders the International Settlement, but this time divided among little districts like Xintiandi and arty (and equally expatty) enclaves like Taikang Road Art Center?

In Shanghai, on the streets of the haves, expats and other relatively well-off Chinese mill to and fro between glittering high rises and Starbucks cafes. Pedestrian and bike traffic is strictly enforced on every corner. On the streets of the have-nots, poorer Shanghainese denizens peddle pirated DVDs, drag car-sized loads of styrofoam on their bikes, and negotiate traffic intersections like warzone crossfire in slow motion. Expats seem to be seldom found on the streets of the have-nots.

I think it’s partly this bizarre juxtaposition that had me laughing so uncontrollably at Leslie’s puking granny story. There’s Louis Vuitton, the staple of coveted luxury goods in one of Shanghai’s most exclusive shopping complexes — all the proof anyone needs that Shanghai can do it like the best of cities. And then there is the helpless old woman throwing up in front of the LV — all the proof anyone needs that Shanghai, or China even, has another face that the hype can’t hide. And when you need to puke, you need to puke, right? Louis Vuitton himself couldn’t convince you not to.

But after a few days here, despite the rough-and-tumble atmosphere on Shanghai’s streets, I had to agree that it is an incredibly vibrant and cosmopolitan city, indeed in some ways more so than Taipei. (It’s one of the reasons people like Leslie come to Shanghai from Taipei.) But Shanghai’s reputation as cosmopolitan, again, comes from only certain, shinier parts of the city, and access to that side, it seems to me, is afforded to precious few people here, many or most of whom are not even Shanghainese.

Coming soon — Part Two: What Comes Around

I didn’t know about this website until they asked me if they could use one of my Flickr photos in their L.A. guide, but it’s pretty cool. Schmap is an online city guide that includes interactive maps of cities and suggested sights. I found the Kafka Museum in their Prague guide when my Rough Guide didn’t have it.

But more importantly, they use photos taken by amateurs in their guides, and they’re using two of mine now in their fourth edition: one of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles and the other of Giordano’s in Chicago.

Five months ago, when I first set foot in Europe, I wished I had a friend with me around every corner to share every new thing I saw. I’ve pretty much gotten over that now; every new thing I see, I see alone. Everything takes on a romantic haze, like I’m wandering alone in the wild, in a “Crouching Tiger”-like jianghu world.

But when I landed in Hong Kong three days ago, I wished again I had someone with me to witness the jarring discontinuity that Hong Kong represented against five months in Europe. How medieval and Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings hundreds of years old were replaced by towering skyscrapers, how languages that were impenetrable to me were replaced by another language similarly impenetrable but at the same time familiar and reassuring. Then also how there was a surreal, comforting continuity from London to Hong Kong in the place names — Salisbury, Victoria, Edinburgh — and in the zebra crossings, and in the electric plugs that I didn’t have to change. Sometimes, talking to fellow travelers from Canada and England, I forgot, as I often did in Europe, where I was and that I am in fact an entire continent away now.

The first night here, off to meet my Cousin Lindy, I hopped a ferry across the harbor and it was Venice all over again — water all around, the hum of the ferry, and across, the seduction of lights. Only this time, instead of Giudecca, it was Kowloon, and instead of the warm glow of the Santa Maria church dome, it was an undulating rectangular mass of blinking skyscrapers. I was entranced all the same.

~

It’s the city of the future. You walk around without ever touching the ground, footbridge to lobby to footbridge, escalator to escalator, walkway to walkway, in a sort of air-conditioned shopper’s paradise. It’s like Hong Kongers are a futuristic metropolitan race of people, elevated permanently above the normal plane of existence, beeping from one place to another with their Octopus cards.

~

And yet there are places like Chungking Mansions, a chaotic hulk of a building where African and South Asian entrepreneurs congregate, and also, incidentally, where some of the cheapest accommodation is in the city. It’s got a certain notoriety among Hong Kongers who see it as a shady market of drug dealing and who knows what else. This makes it all the more exciting.

My hostel is run by Taiwanese expats. The bed is too short, so my feet dangle over the edge while I sleep. It’s also abnormally narrow; I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in the last three days partly, I think, because of a constant fear that I might roll over the edge in middle of the night. Attached to the room, quite unexpectedly, is a tiny, unused kitchen. It doesn’t belong there. Or maybe the room doesn’t belong next to the kitchen. There isn’t so much a shower in this place as there is a shower nozzle attached unthinkingly above a toilet, in a bathroom that looks like it’s not meant to house anything other than a toilet. Living in this place is an exercise in patience and flexibility, but it’s also, as my guidebook calls it, one of the most “atmospheric” places I’ve ever lived in.

But let me just add this by way of afterthought: as fun as Hong Kong has been, I’m off now to Shanghai, for what might be an even better time.

When you first arrive in a new place, you may have some preconceived notions about it. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, or Tokyo is brimming with bowing businessmen. Or you might not know a thing about it. In both cases, the truth is really closer to the latter; the city, for all your ideas about it, or lack thereof, is an unknown quantity.

You don’t know how or how long it takes to get from Gare du Nord to Port de la Chapelle. You don’t know how much help you’ll get from kind strangers (it turns out, usually, a lot). You don’t know what it smells like on the street or just how that belfry in the market square looks when the sun rises behind it at 8 in the morning.

All these things you begin to know the second you step off the train or leave the airport. All these things, the contours of a city, are part of the landscape of your memories by the time you board the train or plane to leave.

The surprising part of it, considering your sheer ignorance of the place days or weeks before, is how loathe you are sometimes to leave. Even when you’re eager to move on, even when you’re homesick. It’s like leaving a new friend, or a new home.

On Dec. 28 of last year, in that hollow space between Christmas and New Year, Eric (of Anticompass, see right), said it best when he wrote about moving on:

… And so I continued on my way with creaking legs and an aching heart. It seems that everywhere I go I meet so many wonderful people, and each place I stay for a few days, I could stay all my life. The hardest part of traveling isn’t the riding nor the uncertainty of where I shall sleep or what I shall eat. It is the certainty that leaving will break my heart and will be an abandonment of home.

Back in London for a week, staying with my friends here. We were meant to watch this new movie “Jumper” the other night. You know, this one:

A genetic abnormality allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Paladins’ who have sworn to kill them.

But here, “jumper” means what “sweater” means in the United States. So if you want to destroy my sweater …

Do your country proud
One of the first things my friend Devon did when she got home last night was ask if I wanted to be on TV today. I would be one of a few Americans on a panel talking about the U.S. presidential election.

I did a little soul searching and then agreed to make a fool of myself on European cable TV. The next morning I got out of bed and rushed over to the studio, where I met the four other people — they were all more than well-informed. They were students of the London School of Economics and a couple were even campaigning for Barack Obama, if not Hillary Clinton.

Basically, in comparison, I sounded a little silly. To keep my nervousness in check, I pretended we were just making a Wayne’s World sort of video podcast with all our African friends phoning in to debate the virtues of Barack versus Hillary.

I hear I will get a DVD of the event, though I doubt I will ever subject myself to the watching of it.

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving continental Europe. After months of moving from place to place, always on the next train to the next city, the next hostel, the next place with the new language and the different food, I can barely believe it. I’m in denial, I think. I can’t believe it’s actually over.

Well, sort of anyway. I’m spending a few more days in London and then flying to China.

I spent my last night here at a hostel in Lisbon that was probably as different from any hostel I’ve stayed at as it could be. It’s probably the second smallest hostel I’ve ever stayed at, which lent it a perfect sort of intimate atmosphere. At dinner (the place has an in-house chef), about a dozen of us, half travelers half Portuguese, sat around the table talking about our homes, cultures, about Lisbon and Portugal. It was the perfect place, and the perfect way to end Europe.

I feel like I’ve been missing in action from my blog for a while, even though it’s only been a little over a week since Cinque Terre.

Maybe because that was two countries (or four cities) ago, and I haven’t written about any of those places. It wasn’t uneventful though:

Avignon was small and kind of charming; I braved some local version of the Santa Ana winds in the early morning to catch my train to Barcelona, which is, incidentally, an awesome city. In Madrid I spent one night in a hostel, and then resigned myself — due to being blindsided by weekend travelers — to staying two nights in an expensive hotel.

There I took my first bath in adult memory and watched Sylvester Stallone and Daniel Dae Kim dubbed in Spanish in their respective movies. I also watched Sky News report breathlessly around the clock on beached ferries in England.

A couple days ago I met a Kiwi on the train who had lost €100 in a shell game on the streets of Barcelona. To compensate, he was sleeping on overnight trains rather than finding beds in hostels. To him destinations were not so much end goals as an incidental byproduct of having slept on a moving train through the night.

Five days — five beds I should say — before I fly back to London, I kind of feel the same way. As if I’m really only interested in each new place (and there are two more) in so far as they offer me another bed, another night, to cross off my countdown to London.

~

I reached Seville in the early afternoon and had a stroll about. The one place I wanted to visit, the Giralda, was closed. Nearby, the trees in the Alcazar garden were swollen with oranges. Some had splattered onto the ground. I was amazed no one was picking them to eat. I saw an intact one on the ground and considered picking it up for the sake of vitamin C, but orange has never really been my fruit, let alone road orange.

~

It’s late afternoon and I’m lying on my hostel bed staring upward, listening to the birds chirping outside and eating those long rolls of bread with chocolate bits in them — you know the kind. The French girl who is reading next to me is stealing glances at me, I can tell. Maybe I’m retardedly enjoying my bread too much. I’m almost done with Europe. Seville is so quiet. Life is good.