Its been awhile since my last update. Sorry for my tardiness in replying your emails. Life in Shanghai is one of daily sensory overload. New sights, smells and sounds are so abundant and overwhelming that its been hard to find the time to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

You'll be glad to know that since my last email I've found a great 3-bedroom apartment only 10 minutes walk from uni. I'm sharing with two Filipino students (one gay, one girl). I just bought a bike and am enjoying cycling around the neighbourhood. Bicycles and electric scooters are so numerous here they own the road - cars have to try and muscle their way through the packs of riders, honking incessantly. Crossing the road here is not about looking right and looking left, you have to look 360 degrees at once as there are so many vehicles coming from all directions. It seems years of communism have imbued the chinese with the sense that everyone has equal right of way.

It's hard to believe I've only been in Shanghai for 6 weeks. It's been such an intense experience I feel like I've been here a lot longer. My Chinese is improving in leaps and bounds. With four tones and meanings to every sound, a simple 3 character street name might sound correct in English but have 63 possible incorrect pronunciations in Chinese. When I first arrived in Shanghai, it took me 3 taxis to get out of the airport because the first two taxi drivers couldn't understand me and refused to move from the cab stand. Having unwisely used all my prepaid credit in Malaysia, I had to hijack a mobile phone from an innocent bystander and call a friend to speak to the taxi driver directly.

Ordering food was another unexpected challenge. I would walk around looking for restaurants with reasonable prices, pictures and english menus, often to no avail. On the first day of uni I lined up in the cafeteria three times, only to chicken out at the last moment, because I couldn't read a single word of the menu and the uneducated staff looked very impatient. Eventually, hunger inspired me to copy the person in front of me. I blurted out an approximation of what had just been ordered and scuttled away with my tail between my legs. After a few days I progressed to ordering "niu rou mien" for breakfast, lunch and dinner ahaha.

There's an old saying: "necessity is the mother of invention" and it probably goes further to explaining my rapid acquisition of mandarin skills, than the size of my brain or hours spent studying, because I've been very successful in killing braincells partying with my classmates, and studying is an affliction that is only beginning to spread as we near our mid-term exam. Though in my defence I'd like to think I'm learning mandarin at the coalface of chinese culture by getting out there and interacting with the locals... as they open my beer bottles and massage my feet... yeah...

With only a few weeks of class under my belt I can now control taxi drivers at will and order waiters to bring me more rice and mineral water... with a twist of lemon! Well ok, I don't always get what I asked for, but it sure beats starving!

Speaking of massages, I've enjoyed the first professional massage of my life here in China. Nobody told me massage was supposed to be painful, but I've quickly gotten used to it. It's now become a weekly indulgence, due to the cheap price and my penchant for pain inflicted by young girls. You can get a one hour full body massage here for about $8 aussie... I consider it cheap for 1 on 1 mandarin tuition.

We recently had a one week holiday to celebrate China's National Day. I decided to take a trip into the countryside and follow two of my German classmates to their hometown of Li Shui, in Zhejiang province, about 6 hours drive out of Shanghai. They told me it was a "small" town, but it turns out "small" by Chinese standards is 500,000 people! Although if you consider that the city of Shanghai alone contains the entire population of Australia, it helps put things in perspective.

The holiday in Li Shui was an educational experience. My classmate's uncle illegally migrated to Germany in the late 80s and worked his way up from a kitchenhand to owning two Chinese restaurants. Now back in China he's one of the nouveau riche, with a hotel, mind boggling property developments and several cars including the latest S-class Mercedes. If there's an American dream, then this is the Chinese dream. Driving around in a bright orange Peugeot 206 convertible we were the Kings of Li Shui. In Li Shui you can get a one hour hair and ear wash, with head, shoulders and hand massage for just $2. I'm an impatient man though, I'd rather do it myself in 10 minutes.

Coffee is one of the few things that is more expensive in China, despite being immensely popular. Starbucks is always packed out despite costing the equivalent of 5 meals for one coffee. It's a pricing indiscrepancy that I'm still trying to solve. One day we were sitting in a new five star coffee house enjoying Italian coffee with fresh fruit, when across the road I noticed two restaurant workers squatting outside on the pavement and slaughtering chickens - first slicing the throat, bleeding them, then putting the weakened body under a cane basket. Occasionally a basket would begin to wander away and had to be sat on. The moment struck me as being very China. There's so much money going around which creates the veneer of modernity and luxury, but at the end of the day, there's a billion Chinese out there still spitting, showering, cutting their hair and killing dinner on the pavement.

Some of my American friends can't handle this crudeness, they complain about China all the time. I'm taking it all in my stride though, and really enjoying the student life. Recently I've been going to a lot of house warming parties that resemble United Nations meetings, with Mandarin students from all over the world. The only common language is Chinese, and faltering baby Chinese at that! It's a surreal but fantastic experience to find myself making friends without the use of English. Being practically the only Australian at JiaoTong University, I find myself somewhat of a free agent, spreading myself between the Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Indonesian and American cliques. Although the Filipino's have claimed me as one of their own as I live with two of them and attend all their group functions.

Most of my classmates are overseas born Chinese like myself, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines. I was surprised to discover that nearly all of them studied at Australian universities. The importance of Australian education in building regional ties cannot be overstated.

Thanks to the generosity of friends who work at events management companies (and friends who forget to renew their visa), I was lucky enough to get free tixx to the Elton John concert, the Shanghai Formula 1, and the Heineken Tennis Open. The F1 was an awesome experience. The cars make the most tremendous sound, which they just don't capture on the television coverage. Elton John was also surprisingly popular here, despite wearing the most horrendous green tracksuit that emphasised his excessively paunchy girth.

I've had some bizarre encounters whilst out on the town. One night I met some drugged up asian homeboys from LA, one of whom actually answered his phone with "Don't fuck with Tony Montana!" Two of these guys are in Shanghai avoiding jail terms in the states. They call it "voluntary parole." But I guess justice works in strange ways because both of them ended up in a Chinese jail a few days after I met them. After my last encounter with asian gang members it was a challenging experience for me to just "chill" with the "ill". When I was asked how I got the scar on my forehead I told them straight out that "someone like you whacked me in the head with a metal chair."

On a lighter note, I was recently set up with a japanese girl who's working here as a swimming coach. Her English is almost non existent so we communicate in a mishmash of broken English, Chinese and one-sided outbursts of Japanese. Our first date ended up being at Pizza Hut, which is a surprisingly classy place in Shanghai... the decor is similar to Hurricanes at Bondi! Anyway the date was quite funny, she made me laugh when halfway through dinner she pulled out a phrasebook titled "Dictionary of English for Unexpected Situations." Later, during a moonlit stroll, she used the book to good effect, directing my attention to a page with the phrase "May I hold your hand?"

Overall, I'm very happy to report that life in Shanghai is everything I expected it to be and more. But a little homesickness is beginning to creep in. The expat life is one of intense but transitory relationships, as most people are just passing through. You bond with people instantly but have to let them go a few months later. So I'm really missing you all back home, and I really miss the beach now that the weather is beginning to turn over here! My friends have warned me that soon I'll be freezing my ass off with subzero temperatures for much of winter.
So for those of you coming to visit me during the Australian Summer Hols, don't forget to bring some warm clothes!