China

When traveling through Asia gets tiring, you can always get a good laugh by opening a menu and feasting your eyes upon the poorly-translated offerings.

Karen and I have been tourist attractions for months, with locals snapping photos of us, presumably to go home and marvel at our freakishly pale skin.

Shanghai has kept in touch with its past by preserving the Bund, a strip of historic buildings along the harbor. Former banks and trading houses have been converted into upscale hotels and shops.

Yes, we are in China and we should be searching out Chinese food. Yet I will never pass up the opportunity to teach my friends about the world’s perfect meal.

I love propaganda art: the chiseled soldiers, the grotesque caricatures, the black-and-white world view. So I was thrilled to find the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre.

We left Hong Kong behind, flying to the mainland in search of the real China. Instead, we found Shanghai. It started with the train.