After three sessions of IV antibiotics and yet another day in my room with my leg up in the air, my left foot still resembles a hairless hobbit’s. It’s better, but not fixed.

Advice from the doctor brother of a kiwi colleague is to hit it with more specific antibiotics, so today Camp Mother Vivien is on the hunt for some Flucloxacillin in between her classes. Given that the stuff is made in China and that most drugs are available over the counter here I’m confident that I’ll be upright again soon. I hope so because that construction site out my window is starting to embed itself into my inner vision.

Major cultural experience today – getting sick.

The morning after the Nanjing trip I awoke to a swollen and painful left foot and immediately blamed Vivien and Bobby for making me walk most of the city in one and a half days. Over the last couple of days it’s been getting more and more unbearable so today ‘Camp Mother’ Vivien enlisted the translating help of a couple of senior students and took me off to the shiny new hospital.

So the first thing you need is an electronic card with your details saved on it – that’s 2RMB at reception. It enables you to go to another desk where they fill out some paper and send you off to the appropriate department – in my case the Bone Truamatology Department. In the room is a young doctor surrounded by a dozen and a half people, some patients and some family, all intently and noisily following proceedings while a patient is examined. Although there is an order noted on the desk and I’m well down it, our student Miley manages to get me up the list and the doctor determines no breaks and sends me off for a blood test. The testing people extract a couple more RMBs as well as the blood and I’m told to come back at 3pm for the results.

Back in the Bone Truamatology room at 3pm it’s chaos with a new lot of patients and supporters plus a group of men who were full of lunchtime whiskey and licking their wounds from a fight. The nurses restored some order and we waited our turn, blood results in hand (normal). Doc quickly diagnosed cellulitis (I know this because Vivien has some medical knowledge and we we able to confirm via Google Translator for iPhone) and wrote out a big long prescription. The nurses station relieved us of 314RMB this time and sent us down to the dispensary where I was issued with three days worth of saline solution, glucose and antibiotics plus the relevant tubes and needles and sent off to the old part of the hospital for a 2-hour drip. I have to go back tomorrow and the next day for the remaining drips which are administered in what looks, smells and sounds like a 19th century train station.

Despite the utterly different way of doing things, the resulting diagnosis and treatment were exactly what I would have got in New Zealand, I’m sure, with the exception that the remaining course of antibiotics wouild probably have been oral rather than returns for more drips. Assuming that I’m fixed within the next few days, I’m impressed.

Unfortunately Miley and Ballard, as wonderfully helpful as they were, were less than impressed – they reckon I should have gone to the traditional Chinese medicine hospital. Maybe next time guys – but only maybe.

After a couple of days of being shown the sights of Nanjing by Vivien and her friend Bobby I spent yesterday with my left foot iced and elevated, swollen and steaming. But it was worth the pain.

A city of over 7 million situated in the Yangtze River delta, Nanjing is the capital of my ‘home’ province, Jiangsu. It’s history is over 6,000 years, evidence of which seems mostly to be long gone, replaced by gleaming new metro lines and wide leafy streets full of fashion outlets. The last of the old inner-city dwellings are being demolished to make way for yet more retail blocks and some of the residents are not happy.

We went to the port in an old colonial-style ‘K’ train – it, too, is destined for extinction soon, as is the port town itself. I guess it’s called ‘progress’.

But it’s an undeniably pretty town, spotless like Shanghai, and the lake – actually part of the Yangtze River – is an oasis of quiet away from the hustle and bustle of big city commerce.

Walking the old streets of inner-city Nanjing, we got talking to a couple of guys whose families have lived in this neighbourhood for generations. But now they’re about to be displaced, with little compensation, and they’re not happy. At all.

Their protest is written in red and the centuries-old well is all but buried beneath discarded furniture. They worry that they can’t afford to live in one of the new residential areas, even if they wanted to. They are resigned to an unknown fate.

Same at the port – piles of rubble and neglect spell the end of an era for the locals. The old lady you see here got very exercised about it – she probably thought that we were western journalists.

Interestingly though, the ‘old’ housing is not really that old at all – perhaps 100 years – although it’s considered to be ancient. What does that say? Does everything simply get replaced at century intervals? I’ll tell you what, with the Chinese building standards of today that interval will be shortening rapidly.

On the outskirts of Shanghai and technically a suburb of the city is this old town, supposedly the best preserved of a few of them around these parts. It’s what you’d expect – a tourist mecca – but kinda pretty in its own way. The hour or so on the bus getting there was just as interesting really, revealing the vastness of Shanghai city.

Forgot to post these few dodgy iPhone pics of Shanghai at night from along The Bund. Magical.

I arrived last night at what will be home for the next four months.

Xuyi (pronounced shur-yee) is a rapidly-expanding rural city in Jiangsu province and was apparently founded over 2,200 years ago by the Ching dynasty. I have yet to learn much about it and I suspect that there is indeed much to learn. One of my fellow ‘foreign teachers’, Vivien, took me around the city in the heat today by bus, foot and tuk-tuk and it seems a lovely friendly place. As the only European foreigners in the city we get stared at quite a bit, but everyone is helpful and polite. Apparently there is virtually no crime in Xuyi and it’s certainly a relief to get away from the pressure of being a tourist in the big cities – there is no hawking or soliciting here. There is also virtually no English signage or language spoken over the entire town.

There is another new foreign teacher here, Jack from Sydney, who along with Vivien and Braden, who have been here for a while, makes up the group of conversational English teachers. We were all hosted by the principal and the chairman of the school board last night at a local restaurant, and tonight attended a more formal banquet in the school dining area with various dignitaries and many of the school’s teachers. There was much eating and toasting and consumption of a rather fiery liquor called baijou which is essentially what comes out of my moonshine still at home. Only chairman David and a couple of the Chinese teachers speak any English – principal ‘Stanley’ doesn’t have a word.

The fast train from Shanghai to Nanjing reached 302kph. Apparently it used to go at 350kph.

The school has 5,000 students aged from 15 – 19. It was founded and built from scratch four years ago.

You don’t notice it at first, but there’s no rubbish in Shanghai. It’s probably because your mouth is hanging open at the sheer scale of the place, but it’s a while before it becomes apparent that the city is cleaner than any in Asia – or in New Zealand for that matter. And only the occasional whiff of that delightful ‘drainy’ odour so familiar to travellers in these parts.

Wandering the narrow old streets around your central hotel reveals everything you’d expect – street stalls, open-air butchers, dark little shops gathered in clusters according to what they’re selling (‘Hairdryer Street’, ‘Dumpling Street’) – yet not even a paper receipt litters the gutter. Perambulating the wide walkway along The Bund together with the thousands of other (mainly Chinese) tourists, and there’s no plastic bags, KFC boxes or other detritis usually found casually discarded in such places.

Take a bus trip for an hour to visit an ancient river city now swallowed up by greater Shanghai – no lolly wrappers jammed down the sides of the seats. Look out the window at the carefully manicured box hedging and plane trees lining the motorway – no plastic bottles jammed in the crevices. No community refuse piled up on the banks of the canals.

After two days of such cleanliness, I’m off to dig the dirt.

Day One in Shanghai I took a tour of the French Concession and surrounds with Shanghai Sideways. A couple of hours in a sidecar zipping in and out of the traffic and through little lanes and byways inaccessible by car – magic. Driver/guide Felix  (a Frenchman with an Irish accent – ladies eat your heart out)  had access to some amazing old hotels and gardens and was very knowledgeable about the city’s history and about its bars.

Not much into jazz myself, but this looks like a bloody good event for those that are http://www.jazzinmartinborough.co.nz/index.html

Fill your boots!