If you're coming from http://mellory.blogspot.com, you're in the right place. This is the new [M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og. It's the old blog under different software on a different server at the moment, but housecleaning will commence when I get a round tuit. Welcome!

In the meantime, if you've got a feedreader and want to subscribe to this stream-of-consciousness ramble for whatever reason, here's a link to the atom feed.

My main impressions of Shanghai thus far can be summed as follows:

  1. Shanghai looks like someone opened a packet of Instant City and Just Added Water. I did not know it was possible to construct so many buildings in so short a time.
  2. Hot chicken soup - especially with mishua (noodles) and goji berries - (we've put those in soup way before they became fashionably antioxidant-riffic) is amazing.
  3. My aunt has an extraordinary number of free hotel slippers in her closet. It's about 10 cubic feet of solid slipper-mass, roughly enough to shod a small rural village.

Also, it's rather annoying not to be able to freely access wikimedia resources, Wikipedia and Wikiversity in particular. Oh, to be utterly technologically spoiled again... although the soy milk here is fantastic, so I can't complain all that much.