Shanghai on Life

Greetings to my loyal audience! It’s been awhile now, but that Korea post really took it out of me I have to say. Life is still chugging along here in Shanghai. It is still warm and we’ve hardly seen any of this rain that people keep talking about, so I could get used to this! Don’t get too jealous though because I’m looking forward to a winter of sub-zero temperatures and no central heating :( After discovering our lack of central heating (and whining about it), Daniel suggested that I might consider wearing a sweater when I feel cold – a harsh slap in the face for an ex-Power-Smart rep..how far I’ve fallen already.

Last weekend I went on a day trip to a nearby city, Suzhou, with my friends Christian and Simon. Suzhou is known for its beautiful gardens and a history full of silk trading and prosperity. Wikipedia taught me that Suzhou is one of Victoria’s four sister cities, a little random but interesting fact. The day was fun and relaxed; we rented some rusty and rickety bicycles for $5 and biked our ways to some of these famed gardens, lunch and a temple. When we arrived back at the train station we found out it would be 3 hours before the next train and even that one only had “standing room only” tickets left. The Germans filled this wait time with beer (so cliché) and, eventually, seeing how many crackers they could fit in their mouth at one time (I may have encouraged this behaviour). I, on the other hand, managed to entertain myself with a Vogue magazine that I couldn’t read and a few too many games of solitaire. Not feeling like standing for 50 minutes on the train, we spent the ride home wedged into an empty luggage compartment and managed to catch quite a few stares…now not just the white people on the train but the white people inappropriately sandwiched between their suitcases on the train.

I have recently set about on a mission to make more Chinese friends. I have been hanging out quite a bit with a girl names Joy who is my age and studying accounting at Donghua University in Shanghai. She is in many ways typical Chinese…only child (with parents who worry too much) from Hunan province, came to Shanghai to study and obtain her Shanghai residence permit, loves KTV, table tennis, etc.). Joy speaks English quite well and had recently decided she wanted to expand her horizons (and improve her English) by meeting some foreign friends.  Last Thursday we went for lunch, shopping and a dose of education at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition and the Shanghai Museum. The exhibition has some neat exhibits about the history of Shanghai as a city, a floor dedicated to the upcoming World Expo (starting this May in Shanghai FYI), and (what everyone comes for) a miniature scale model of the city of Shanghai – very cool! I managed to find my neighbourhood but couldn’t locate our apartment building exactly.  The Shanghai museum was also very cool, a manageable amount of artifacts for one afternoon…calligraphy, jade, ancient currency, furniture, traditional paintings, etc. Joy’s father is a Professor who teaches ancient Chinese history (a subject she also takes personal interest in), so she had many insights which made the museum a lot more interesting. I have also begun a language exchange arrangement with another Chinese girl, Jasmine, who works and lives in my neighbourhood. Jasmine has a variety of projects she works on professionally, one of which includes a corporate social responsibility consulting project targeted at real estate development firms in Shanghai. When we meet I usually help her with fine tuning the English translations of her business plan or whatever else and she helps me with Mandarin.  It’s nice to get some free help and actually I enjoy working  on her stuff as well (CSR upstart initiatives in Chinese real estate development anyone? Cue nerdy business student drooling!).

Last weekend Sandra went to Xian (home of the famed Terracotta Army) to meet with one of her friends from school in Germany who is currently on exchange in Hong Kong. Sandra’s friend was traveling with five of her friends she met in Hong Kong and one of them happened to be Canadian. One question leads to another and this girl asks Sandra if she knows a Canadian Amy in Shanghai. “Like my roommate Amy?”.. So out of the oodles of universities in Hong Kong and the hundreds of exchange students at their university, it just so happened that Sandra’s friend, Nina, befriended my friend from UVic BCom and former co-worker, Lily. We didn’t realize that they were friends and in fact, both of them had planned to visit and stay with us in Shanghai together but we were in Korea at the time so couldn’t play host..all the while we never figured out that they were coming together and it wasn’t just a coincidence! aaahhhh small world-ness strikes again!

Other highlights in recent weeks have included being taken to dinner (along with Andy, the other BCom exchanger from UVic) with a bigwig from UVic Business International Programs who happened to be in Shanghai on business. A very nice and easy going guy, it was good to see a familiar face..also a passionate advocate of international exchange (Japan changed his life once upon a time), we get along just fine. But lets not forget, we got treated to some seriously awesome (and fancy) Chinese cuisine – lotus root stuffed with sticky rice, sichuan tofu, the coolest looking tea I’ve ever drank in my life, the list goes on. Last Thursday we watched our friend Simon (not lung Simon, another Simon) play trombone with “one of the best youth orchestras in the world” who he usually plays with in Germany.  I guess they are good enough to have all-expense paid trips to China, so I think it’s actually true…they were here for a week touring around with their last stop being in Shanghai, so not a bad deal! The concert was free and ended up being packed with locals who just went crazy for this German orchestra which was really nice to see. There was all this clapping to the beat, swaying, whooping and hollering, and a final standing ovation…it gave you those cross-cultural warm and fuzzies. On a side-note, some members of the orchestra returned to Germany with H1N1 which is apparently creating newsworthy quarantine and investigation hell for both the German and Chinese Governments…..78 people hitting different cities every night for a week makes it a bit difficult to narrow down the origin.

The basketball season has finally started up over here and I went to check out the team on Sunday night. I wasn’t able to play with them as I am sick at the moment (I may as well admit it as my mom has already busted me blowing my nose on skype), but the team looks great and I’m quite certain I will get a chance to play with them! I made it to a Rotaract meeting for the first time last night and it was also positive. The Shanghai club is a little more formal and a little older than our club at home, but everyone was very friendly and they are currently working on some impressive projects, so I’m hoping to stick with it.

I’ve been in Shanghai for two months already! This realization comes with pretty mixed emotions…less than three months to go until Jen, Cody and (hopefully) Sarah arrive for our grand tour around Southeast Asia (hooray!), but at the same time I feel like things are really getting started here, it’s already half way done :( On the bright side, it’s my birthday on Sunday, woohoo!

The first half of this post sat in the “drafts” folder for a little too long, so if time lines seem messed up, it’s because they are.  But anyhoo, this past weekend a group of eight of us went to Huangshan or “the Yellow Mountains”  where we saw some very famous Chinese scenery action! Anyway, more on Huangshan to come!

Hope everyone is well in fine, apologies to those of you who diligently check for updates..more posts are on the way :D

-amy

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