As a warm-up to the Shanghai trip...

I had dinner at one of those Chongqing steamboat places in Bugis yesterday. It has a dirty toilet. The air-conditioning wasn't working. Customers around me talked loudly in heavily accented Mandarin. And in one of those embarrassing moments of the night, the friend caught me shouting across a few tables in trying to communicate with the wait staff (which, in my defense, happened only because the said waitress / whatever-you-call-her refused to come any closer and expected me to sound off from where I was sitting). Oh well, talk about pre-trip cultural immersion.