I fell perfectly OK about skipping tourist activities today. Not sure the garden was worth its. #shanghai #china #omg #rain

Gotta love the person in the Chinese government who said "we should have a hotline for foreigners and it's absolutely essential we provide Esperanto translation." #china #shanghai #esperanto #travel #lostintranslation

And they are OFF!!! Just wrote the final postcard of the 200 I've penned over the past several weeks. When yours arrives, please let me know! I'd love to see the time they take to arrive from China or Russia and the condition they're in. (And oh yea, feel free to throw in a few dollars into the Oh My Dollar! Kickstarter on October 10th to help offset international postage and make the Get Your Money Together workbook a reality!) #postcards #travel #bowie #cats #ohmydollar #shanghai #china #tea #personalfinance

A rainy day in Shanghai so I am using the afternoon to finish my last 20 (out of 200!) postcards to folks! (And I checked into a great hostel that emailed me freaking directions, solving last night's ghost hostel woes). #rain #shanghai #china #slowtravel #travellife #postcards

This is what my face looks like when it turns out your "railway station" hostel is actually 13 miles from the railways station you came in on, and so you spend an hour on transit (after 20 mins in line to buy tickets) and walk 25 mins with a 17lb backpack in the pouring rain only to discover... there is nothing at the address Booking.com gave you. You email the property, and of course they tell you to get on wechat, which you can't activate in a public place because it is too loud and it only does voice activation... so now you're at Starbucks, unable to use their wifi because they don't believe in your Chinese phone number which is apparently a special useless foreigner phone #. And then you just decide that you're going to book a hotline 4-star hotel as close as possible. So...this is my face after I spent $50 on a room when I already had a hostel booked. Because my hostel appears to not exist. I am doing nothing else today except maybe work out in my 4-star hotel gym. #travel #fuckups #charmedlife #notasglamourousasitlooks #china #shanghai