Max circumnavigates; Jacob and I plan a shorter trip-- June 30

5:55 Eventually J called the hostel and the wallet is there! Another person with a phone and Chinese makes everything easy. He fixed everything just like that!  So Max (who is getting better) will come back here to his apartment and wrap things up, I hope to be helpful but will probably just be annoying, and then once he is gone to the airport for his trip back to Charlottesville, Jacob and I will go back to Hangzhou for another shot and to retrieve the wallet. I am so glad. As Max and I left I thought I would like to have seen more of Hangzhou, so I have a chance. Maybe I will get some Xihu shue after all.  We return tomorrow, do the river cruise around the Bund, and then Jacob leaves for Harbin the next day. I'm astonished and of course glad that Jacob and Max have time to spend with me when they are closing shop in Shanghai, seeing friends, and so on. I will go to Souzhou on my own and on to Beijing on the bullet train.  I sit now on the pentultimatehouse roof garden and the morning guys are ministering to their many potted plants.

The Hangzhou hostel backed up on an elementary school and there were three classes playing circle games on the playground early-- 7:30--, one to the tune of London Bridges. When I went out the front, I realized it was a fancy school: cars lined up were Audis and Mercedes. There is a real disparity of wealth here in the land of socialism with Chinese characteristics. There are numberless people, old and young, doing minimal jobs: sweeping the street with twig brooms, tending things that might live without it, and so on. At least two custodians on the train from Hangzhou, for example, 8 cars, sweeping up during the trip. They  often seen cruising subway cars and sweeping the streets. Often you see them binding bamboo branches together to make brooms.  Families seem often to live in tiny spaces that are really just beds, with  big kettles facing the street: their noodle shop. And the rich are ostentatious, the ads are to my eyes even more pushing impossible and status-oriented lifestyle stuff like fashion and perfume. The middle and up class are strivers. Maybe the younger street sweepers aspire to their magic moments too, whether romantic and financial. On a backpack carried by a subway rider: "the leaves wait in the forest for wonderful love". A face mask, black, with the question 'why?'. Lots of text remix stuff on t-shirts, clumps of letters or syllables.A girl on the subway watching a porn movie by herself on her smartphone.

Well, all is OK, and tomorrow I will get another view of the landscape along the train tracks. there is very little real countryside. In places, there are strange developments of blockish apartment buildings about 5 storeys, with domes or tiny pagodas on top, and antennas with graduated spheres: looks a bit science fictiony or like the exurbs of Oz, just planted in what looks like the middle of nowhere. 

 There are many trees planted, quite a lot of landscaping. Even large, established trees often are supported by elaborate frameworks, so you might see a landscaped forest, with each tree in its quadruped box. Is it that the soil in Shanghai is so alluvial, basically sandy, that things are more likely to tip over? There are really no rocks or pebbles in the dirt here except chunks of debris at construction sites; and it looks like little macro-sized organic matter like leaves, humus.

The main fact of life here is that it is hot and humid. The air sweats. Take a shower and never get dry; clothes likewise never seem clean and dry. I am wet and dripping, but the girls on the subway look crisp and fresh. I never go anywhere without a bottle of water, 2 or 3 yuan here, and the bottles pounced on by roving recyclers when I am finished. I rarely have to pee. Max has air conditioning in his apartment, a unit which is quiet, much quieter than ours, and has vents that move, like a rotating fan only vertical. The effect is occasional very pleasant breezes. But somehow, because of the traveling effect, one plunges outside and explores much of the day. Traveling is a whole different mode of existence.

The boys have been heroic, working together to show me Shanghai, their lives there, and a variety of interesting foods. I'm really impressed that they hang with their own tribe but also have a number of Chinese contacts and friends