Shanghai & Jingdezhen — twelve years, a thousand years, my mum

Shanghai after twelve years. The city did not wait for me — it never does — and yet something in it still felt like mine. Towers where there were none. Roads I no longer recognised. And underneath all of it, the same pulse, the same confidence, the same Shanghai. Mum flew in from KL. That alone made it. We found our rhythm easily — the way you do with someone who has known you your whole life. Dorsett Pudong as home base, the river always somewhere nearby. We caught up the way families do when distance has been too long: slowly, over food, over nothing in particular. Libo craft beer. I want to talk about Libo craft beer. The can design looks exactly like insecticide — and I mean that as the highest compliment. Great beer. Unexpected and completely itself. The bicycles. Helmetless, unhurried, available everywhere — you just pick one up and merge into the great wide roads, into the traffic, into the city. And somehow it works. No rage. No hostility. Just absorption. The city takes you in. Then Jingdezhen. I did not know what to expect from the porcelain city and left genuinely moved. A thousand years of craft still alive in the hands of people who mean it. Banana trees everywhere — and banana leaf motifs woven into the ceramics, the architecture, the surfaces of things. There is a reason the banana leaf has lived so long in poetry and visual art. It carries something — impermanence, shelter, quiet resilience. I felt that here more than anywhere. I want to come back. Properly. With time and patience and enough in the pocket to sit at a wheel and make something badly and try again. Jingdezhen deserves more than a visit. It deserves a residency. The EVs everywhere. Silently, completely, the future just arriving without announcement. And the people — warm in a way that needed no translation. We were lucky, or maybe this is just how it is. A small note on navigation: Google and the AIs I usually rely on were genuinely less useful here. I had to find my way differently... like try and understand Baidu. Unexpected Courage and Sons of the Neon Night on the flight. Inflight movies that somehow rhymed with where I was going and where I'd been — a good entry point and a clean closing bracket for the trip, that my reasoning. First time back in twelve years. First time to Jingdezhen. First time doing both with my mum beside me. Worth every year of the wait. Shanghai · Jingdezhen | with Mum | Dorsett Shanghai Pudong · Yujian Hotel #shanghai #jingdezhen #chinatravel #porcelaincity #familytravel #dorsettshanghai #yujianhotel #EVchina #12yearslater #shanghairevisited #motheranddaughter Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/dope-cat/calm-river License code: RA5DNARJ9C9BIB6J