A brand new update from Hong Kong.
The last 2 weeks were great, although the last 2 days were really crappy (more about this later)
To start from the beginning, last time I wrote, I had just arrived back in Kunming, with a week left before heading to Shanghai.
As you could read, I was planning on travelling a lot in this period, but shame on me, I stayed another week in good old Kunming.
Quickly when I arrived, I met a cool guy from Berlin, Moritz. Together with Yang Yang, the painter, we went to a great electronic party.
For some reason there were some drums standing on stage next to the dj, and me and Moritz, a drummer, ended up playing those later that night. (still couldn't beat those memorable nights in Brussels though)
Afterwards we ended up in another bar. There weren't a lot of people left and I was pretty drunk, so I asked some bargirl if I could play some tunes from my ipod.
After an hour of playing and drunk conversations with random people, a guy came talking to me.
He turned out to be the owner and enthusiastically told me he loved the music. He welcomed me to come play there anytime, he'd pay me, make posters, etc.
The next day me and him met again, since I wanted to take this opportunity.
I was leaving saturday of that week and sadly fridaynight was fully booked, so we decided on wednesday.
Being in too short notice to publish the party and on a weekday, the bar would probably be a bit dead, but oh well..
Eventually it turned out to be a very good night.
Yang Yang sadly couldn't come, but surprisingly her artist friend came all by himself, although he barely speaks english.
We had the most fun, dancing a lot.
People came and went, as it goes on weeknights.
Still at periods after 3o clock the dancefloor was full, and from 5o clock onwards, there was a stable after-party crowd.
As it often goes, those last hours partying after sunrise were brilliant.
The party got very wild and drunk, everyone dancing on tables.
Appropiately, when the bar closed, this happened in the worst way, with discussions and a pretty entertaining girl-fight. A crowd was formed by some 30 estranged looking chinese people, on their way to work.

The last 2 days in Kunming I spent mostly with a nice friend I met that night. I had some more great times with the bar-owner, who invited me to return to Kunming later. He'd book me for a friday/saturday night dj-gig then.

Finally, Shanghai.
As I mentioned before, the reason to go to Shanghai that period was my father, who came all the way over for a 1-week citytrip.
We had a great time in a great city.
After 3 months of low budget travelling, the entire week in Shanghai felt vip-class.
Because of the expo, the city was a bliss to visit. It was clean, safe, had perfect public transport and everywhere were english-speaking 'volunteers' to help us with any problem.
We stayed at a nice hotel, spent our days walking through a surprisingly green and livable city, enjoyed regular coffee breaks and fine dining.
A visit to the art district was well worth it, where we visited lots of galeries. One day I was by myself, so I went back there to discover even more.
We spent 2 days visiting the expo. Luckily my father had arranged a tour of the pavillions via the Belgian pavillion. This meant we didn't have to queu, we just had to show up at the right pavillion at the right time.
At the most popular pavillions, waiting times could be as much as 5 hours, so we were very thankful.
Most pavillions went one of two ways. The first one was a bland PR-show about the country. In this category only Spain made a great impression, by a beautifully designed pavillion and a splendid flamenco-show. Switzerland also succeeded in bringing some mountain charm to Shanghai.
Others chose to stick to the expo theme 'Better city, better life'. This usually resulted in either irritating moralizing or a showcast of visions of an annoying naivite short of adressing any issue. The only truly memorable pavillion (to me) was the British one. Beautiful in concept and a work of art in rendering.
There were some great father & son talks and time was well spent.
All in all, a great time in Shanghai.

And then, for some reason, came a deep dive back to earth, by far the worst days travelling yet.
It started the day my father left, early in the morning. For the first time I felt really sick. Fever, headache, nauseous, exhausted, ...
Check-out was at noon, at which point I left the hotel feeling like a zombie.
Outside was a smoldering 30 degrees.
Feeling worse every second, before I could retreat to another (cheaper) hotel, I had to pick up my laundry.
The day before, my father and I had the brilliant idea to take my dirty clothes with us on a trip. Eventually in a random street, in the most chinese of neighborhoods, we gave it to a little store.
I was to pick up my clothes at 4o'clock.
Before this I sat in a shadowy bar, drinking water with closed eyes.
Eating was out of the question.
Finally I went to pick up my clothes, however as life has its pleasant surprises, the only metroline that went there was out of service that day.
I spent at least an hour walking up there, not counting a 15min break I took in some fastfood restaurant, not to eat, but to lay my head on the table for a while and trying to surpress my nausea.
Finally arriving at the laundry shop, I discovered that in my morning zombie state, I had thrown away the ticket of the shop.
Noone in the shop spoke a word of english, noone in the street looked vaguely like an educated chinese.
I tried communicating with the few words of chinese I knew, but they just replied me to wait there for another person to come, presumably the person who had kept shop the day before.
I just sat down there. After a while I felt so sick I needed to find a place to vommit. I mumbled some english 'back in 10min' and pointed somewhere, at which they looked cluelessly.
There was a park nearby, where I took my time to feel a little better.
Having found little energy I had left, I went back to the shop and gave it another try.
I asked pen and paper, and drew my clothes.
This lead to a pretty quick solution.
Now I just had a horrible walk back in front of me.
My bags were still at the Sofitel, but I thought about getting first to the other hostel, it was getting pretty late already.
Before my father left, I had found a cheap one and noted the details on a paper. However, since on hostelworld the chinese name/adress wasn't mentioned, the western writing was all I could show the taxi drivers. None of them could bring me there. Eventually it was getting even later, so I just went back to Sofitel.
I had spent five hours getting my laundry, walking endlessly, countless times I had to sit down and rest somewhere on the sidewalk or hurry to a nearby toilet.
In Sofitel I asked at the reception if they knew the place. Sure, no problem, I just had to get in the taxi.
I ended up at a YMCA hotel, with somewhat the same name as what I had on my paper, only with rooms that costed 80euros/a night.
I was finished, I needed to sleep, so I payed the price.
First time travelling I bought an expensive room, there was no way I could enjoy it.
I ordered my first meal of the day through room service, barely ate 3 spoons of rice and went to bed.

Next day, 5h30 off to the airport. I felt horrible as before. Showing my bad streak hadn't come to an end, in the morning taxi-ride I lost my ipod. Although I was wearing long trousers with deep pockets, somehow my ipod managed to fall out.
I felt nauseous again, and tried getting everything out of my system before boarding the plane.
After a bearable flight, sleeping mostly, I arrived in rainy Hong Kong.
Right after grabbing my bag, next to the Luggage transport band, I opened it to get my raincoat, discovering my shaving cream released its content all over my stuff. Although the last 2 days left me in a rather depressive mood, at least it got tragicomic by now. However, I spent an hour of cleaning at a toilet, which lately had become the most convenient place to hang out anyway.
I might add one more story to my list of misfortunes, which happened when arriving at the hotel in Hong Kong. As expected, it's an expensive city, so finding cheap accomodation is very difficult. As most people, I ended in the notorious Chungking Mansions.
As you'll see on the pictures, this truly is a monster. It's an enormous, ramshackle high-rise building, a ghetto of immigrants filled with hundreds of dirty hostels owned by indians, pakistani and people from countless different african nationalities.
I ended up in one of the few that offered dorm rooms. Twice the price you'd pay in mainland china, it offered half the comfort. First evening there was a great start, with some 8 cops entering the dorm for a drug addict. This guy was seriously tripping. His chin wet from saliva, he stood at random places in the room, doing some weird signals with his hands and staying in the same position for minutes at a time, eyes closed or looking with glassy eyes. To everyone's surprise the cops 'spoke' 10min with the guy, basically checking his papers and then just left, while leaving him.
Some girls were sleeping in the dorm and were really uncomfortable with him being there. When he became more restless and went over to other people's beds, falling down every two steps, the girls went talking to the owner. This middle-aged chinese guy was quite the picture, with two squint eyes and on his chin 6 hairs each 10cm's long. He only spoke basic english, enough however to convey his utter desinterest in the matter.
The eventual solution consisted of him taking the drugged guy's key and us locking the door of the dorm so the guy couldn't come back in.
Now I was a wreck and had a great nights sleep after this, however the girls say the guy knocked on the door all night, while they refused to let him in.

Im writing this now, hoping I had my portion for a while.
I felt really shitty, but here I am, in Hong Kong, so better make the best of it.
Anyhow, pretty soon another post where I'll tell some things about this remarkable city. Pics coming much earlier!