Okay, so this first blog post from China has been a long time coming, but I don’t feel toooo bad about it as Cody and Sayuri are the only people who know the URL as of now :P Special thanks to Cody for setting this guy up after I found out the google blog I started was blocked over here.. it looks very pretty, don’t you think?
Okay, so lets see, I guess I’ve been in China just over two weeks now, but it’s hard to believe it’s only been two weeks – so much stuff has happened! I see things everyday I want to tell you guys about, but given my blogging track record so far, I guess only a fraction of those things I see and experience will make it on here..but I will try my best!
So, first things first, Shanghai is sweet! I can’t even describe how great this city is! ahhh no really, words can’t describe! But lets start from the beginning..
So, I arrived in Shanghai the on a Saturday evening and took a cab (without hassle) to my new apartment where my roommate Sandra was waiting. The apartment is gorgeous and quite possibly the nicest apartment I will ever live in for the rest of my life (it can only be downhill from here I’m sure). Wood flooring throughout, a balcony with a great city view, nice kitchen (which so far, has barely been used :D), spacious bedrooms, modern furnishings and some nice Chinese artwork. The location is prime as well..We live right in the city and only a 10-15 minute walk from the main campus of our university. The area is called Xujiahui (takes awhile before you can say that one properly to the cab driver), which is a nice area for sure but perhaps a bit TOO full of western comforts ..Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks are within walking distance as well as many mega malls.
My roommate Sandra is from Germany and the two of us seem to have quite a few parallels including going on our first exchanges in the same year (she went to Sidney, BC!), are the same age, doing the same academic program at home (more or less) and in Shanghai, have the same travel goals and roughly similar life goals…the list goes on. Anyhoo, it feels like we’ve known each other for months rather than weeks and despite spending oodles of time together (at school, at home, on the metro, out with friends, etc.) we are still getting along great. Sandra and I have a third roomie, Daniel (aka “Danny Boy,” “Dan the Man,” and “the Danimal”) a most fabulous gay Shanghainese guy. Dan was born and raised in Shanghai, is 19 years old and studies music at Shanghai Normal University. He speaks great English and is a very willing and helpful translator, tour guide and friend to me and Sandra. It’s Dan’s first time living away from home (his parents live in a suburb of Shanghai) and being a much loved and doted on only child, sometimes Dan needs as much help with his big transition as we do – so we are all getting something out of our little international family! So far life with the roomies is great; we often eat together, shop together, go to the bar together and on occasion, shamefully order McDonald’s together (they deliver in Shanghai! AND you can order in English…it’s bad I know, but if you were here…. you’d probably do it too).
So now, back to the start…after two days in Shanghai of running errands and getting settled in, we went to school on the Monday to register. This was an interesting experience..our first exposure to the disorganization and chaos that is the Jiao Tong exchange program. It was a confusing day full of much misinformation and miscommunication (actually quite a typical day for me in China) but as a bonus we met some other students in out program, and they were/are great. Registration involved turning a corner and getting shot in the head with some laser gun, followed by a thermometer in the armpit, followed by spending an hour of registering wearing a surgical mask and facing demands to go to the hospital as I was suspected of having Swine Flu (joy!). Anyway, after some explanations about being from Canada and not being acclimatized to the Shanghai heat (extremely humid 35+ degree weather) I convinced them to take my temperature after a half hour in some air conditioning…turns out I was right, no fever, and more importantly no flu! After registration Sandra and I went home and booked flights to Guilin, a city in southern China, to take advantage of our newfound week off school (more on Guilin to come).
That night we were invited to KTV (karaoke) with Sandra’s Mandarin tutor, Amanda. We were told we were going with some “business friends” of hers which turned out to be some old Chinese men! We arrived at a very swanky KTV club where we were taken to a room with elaborate fruit plates, all-you-can-drink brandy and the aforementioned old Chinese men. Nobody spoke English aside from Amanda, but even with a translator the evening proved to be very culturally confusing. After a few minutes of translated small talk, about 7 or 8 gorgeous young Chinese girls, who were dressed to the nines, filed into the room in a line. We were then told that these business associates were now going to choose some girls to “have a drink with them.” A few were chosen, a new line came in and another was chosen…maybe 4 girls total. Following this there was lots of glass clinking and drinking, the girls played dice games and chatted with and sometimes massaged the old men – eally feeling like ‘Babe:Pig in the City’ at this point in the evening! We weren’t sure if the girls were prostitutes and Amanda was also unsure what extent of “services” they provided…There’s a special term for this kind of “cocktail waitress” in Chinese that I forget now, but apparently they are not usually prostitutes? That’s according to Daniel anyway. Sandra and I were told if we wanted to be polite we needed to be drinking or singing (secret third option being flirting with old business men with whom we didn’t speak a common language)…singing it was! and so we sang and sang and sang songs that nobody had heard or could understand, but they seemed happy about it anyway. I never imagined that singing sober karaoke in front of strangers would be my least awkward option in a social situation! We`re still not sure the real reason we were invited to this evening of awkwardness, but at least it provided us with some insight into a side of Chinese business culture..the kind of stuff they absolutely can’t teach you in a text book!
The following day we left for Guilin which is in an are of China famous for its natural beauty and is a very popular vacation spot for Chinese tourists. We stayed in a hostel and spent four days traveling around the surrounding region. We saw gorgeous rice terraces, visited an apparently traditional village of the Yao minority population (more of a tourist trap, but still quite cool actually), took a river cruise on a bamboo boat, visited some pretty rad caves, and poked around historical sites which we didn’t understand the significance of due to a lack of English translation. Other highlights included Sandra getting pick pocketed (actually more funny than serious as she lost just a bit of money and nothing else..great ammunition for teasing), improving our Chinese language skills while shopping at night markets (“how much is that one” and “20 yuan?! no, that’s too expensive” was about as far as we got), and having our first Chinese full body massage (cost was around $8 CAD for the hour…actually it was more painful than pleasurable, but still a total steal!). But of course my personal favourite had to be becoming a tourist attraction in our own right and having our picture taken by excited Chinese tourists as I guess Westerners are considerably rarer in this area of China and Chinese people typically don’t travel very much or too far…they usually try to do it when you’re not looking, but when you catch them they just keep staring and snapping away. I decided that the least awkward and most fun response was to strike a pose which tended to get a favourable reaction.
Returning from Guilin, we trekked back to school where we were met with more disorganization and administrative shenanigans, but those details are not particularly fun or interesting, so we`ll skip that part! Looks like I will be taking courses in E-commerce, Compensation Management, Cross-Cultural Management and Networks and Internet..unfortunately, there was no feasible opportunity to take Chinese language for credit, so I will be doing private tutoring along with most of the other exchange students. I can’t quite get the required number of academic hours over here, so the UVic BCom program has requested that I write a book report in addition to my coursework..seems to be a rather grade 7ish type assignment, but I am not complaining! I will write more about school in China later when I get further along.
Recent days have been filled with some great partying in the fine Shanghai night clubs, meeting people, and getting my bearings in Shanghai, at school and our neighbourhood. I’m going to the Rotaract Club of Shanghai’s meeting on Monday and hope to find somewhere that I can play basketball over here (women’s basketball is somewhat of a niche sport over here, but in a city of 20 million + people, it’s not impossible to find I guess). On the weekend we went to the a bar on top of the Hyatt hotel on the Bund (river running through Shanghai)..it was the best urban view I think I`ve ever seen in my life! Drinks were running about $12 CAD, but if you hold on to one for an hour and half they don’t kick you out :P Unable to catch a cab, we took a death-defying scooter ride..part of the true Shanghai experience..we even ended up getting ripped off by the driver in the end which is also part of the true Shanghai experience ;) !
On Sunday, Sandra and I went shopping at a couple of the local markets (the good ones full of knock-offs and people yelling at you), followed by a $5 pedicure (which on second thought was not the best choice sanitation-wise, but what’s done is done! I can already see my mother`s cringing face as she reads this). Today we went to school in the morning only to find we had a three hour break..decided to have a brunch of noodles (actually not an uncommon breakfast food here) with a couple of friends…delicious won ton soup for about 80 cents CAD (Steph be jealous!) followed by another one-hour massage..left with just enough time to return to school! Haha life here is just too awesome and hilarious sometimes! Hopefully more to come about my spoiled Shanghai lifestyle in future posts.
Anyway, I really have to stop now…this has been a blogging marathon, but at least the important bits are in here. Oh yeah, and I’m going to Korea in a little over a week! We have a week off for Chinese national day! woohoo!
Hope everybody is well at home, please send me a line and let me know how you’re doing!
Much love from Shanghai,
Amy