Words Fail Me

After getting my sea shipment and confirming that I didn’t have any of the cords I need hidden anywhere, I tried finding an electronics mall that Eli & I had visited on my first visit to Shanghai over a year and a half ago.  I remember that from Xintiandi we had walked east on Fuxing Rd. and that it was a multistory building on the southwest corner.  My memory — both spacial & pathfinding — are above average and I’ve frequently been able to “feel out” places I’d been to before in places I’d traveled to with years or even decades between visits.

Which is why it surprised me when I went walking down Fuxing Rd. a couple weeks ago and couldn’t find it.  Saturday, I decided I must not have gone far enough east, so I tried again.  This time I Googled the address and spent several passes, back and forth, north/south, east/west, across the intersection looking for the place.

In fact, it was the exact intersection where I had aborted my search two weekends ago.  But it had turned into a bank in the intervening 18 months.  (Daly’s response when hearing that part of the story was, “We are a developing country…”)

My quest continued.  Yesterday, I tried registering for Taobao (China’s eBay?) and Alipay (China’s PayPal?) — all in Chinese — with middling results and couldn’t figure out a way to fund my account without a Chinese bank account.  So, today I gave up and decided to buy a replacement Mac Mini power supply from Amazon back in the U.S., have it shipped to DWA’s remailing address in New Jersey, and have them reship it to me herein Shanghai.  Double shipping costs and custom duties be damned.

Instead, I screwed up and managed to get it shipped to my old, defunct address in Pasadena.

Well, fuck.

UPDATE:  I was so furious with myself, I went ahead and bought another one and had it shipped to New Jersey.  By next week I may be the owner of three outdated power supplies spread across three cities on two continents for an obsolete model of Mac Minis.  I’d love for Werner Herzog to shoot a documentary following each one and intercutting between their different lives.