Wow, so many developments... The short version is I'm staying at least until Dec. 21st. I have an absolute assload of pictures to upload from downtown Shanghai, tons of night shots of the shopping streets, and a few shots today of the Oriental Pearl tower, both up and down. Unfortunately, my gallery at binaryshower.com is blocked by the Chinese firewall, and the internet at the hotel isn't free so I'll have to wait until I'm back at the plant to upload them. Walking around the Pudong side of Shanghai (the Huangpu river bisects the city, Punxi (I think) on the left, Pudong on the right) going to the Shanghai Museum on Thursday, we ran into 4 girls who immediately started speaking to us in fairly decent English. They started talking about all kinds of stuff, asking us where we were from, trying to practice their English, on and on. After all that was over, they asked us if we wanted to follow them to a tea house for the "International Tea Ceremony held every 3 years to celebrate the harvest". We politely declined, but apparently tourists get sucked into going and get smacked with a 700-800 RMB (USD$102-117) bill for a few cups of tea. We got about 200m down the road when we were approached again by 2 girls, same conversation, almost the same exact story. If you are looking for a similar shopping experience, go to Chinatown in NYC. You get assaulted EVERYWHERE by people who's only English words are Rolex, Omega, pen, laser (green lasers are big here), and the mother of them all, iPhone. Being Westerners, we're obviously easy to spot (and one of the guys I'm with is about 6'4", he's even easier to spot). Looking at the watches you can see pretty blatant spelling mistakes, the better knockoffs are in the copy shops.