a woman in my office was just telling about this party she was invited to hosted by the 'Altruistic Alcoholics." apparently you pay a premium on beer and the money made goes to developing schools in some rural region or something. she says it's all foreigners (figures.) lol.
work is still boring. finished the FAQ page and then i emailed my boss to say i'd been looking at it and they sent me an already updated version of it to look at. so that was kind of annoying. done with that now. i might cut this internship off a week early if there's nothing for me to do. Norma says i can come down to Kunming as soon as i'm available and stay as long as i can... that sounds more fun than trying to kill hours and hours of time in this office. they might ask me to come to this big signing event tomorrow though. the head of the IFC is coming to sign on the Bank of Beijing as a new partner of CHUEE. my boss said they might actually need me. which would be a nice change of pace, ha.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
this is far too CHUEE...
ok, if you havent figured out that CHUEE is pronounced "chewy" then I'm sorry the puns were lost on you. if you DID figure that out... i'm sorry i'm filling my blogs with really dumb puns.
I've actually been productive today. I finished the FAQ page and looked through the rest. I was using all my comm school communications training to fix it... checking readability statistics, increasing white space, parallel structures, using different fonts for headings (yay Ariel...). Who knew I'd use that again? Actually, it's probably the most useful part of Comm school.
So it's 2pm. Haven't gotten lunch yet. This morning we went to this morning market (zaoshi) which was cool. Just rows and rows of fruit and vegetable sellers plus people making all sorts of street food. We had this doufu soupy thing that has pepper and stuff (super spicey) plus this corn bun with carrot inside and... this pancake thing with veggies inside... anyway, it was really good. I wish I'd brought my camera to the morning market because it was quite a sight.
Anyway, people come back tomorrow so maybe I can figure out more to do with my time here. A teacher from last summer at IES asked me to be an orientation leader this year, which would be cool... you get a free tshirt and everything! hehe. Anyway, I told him probably since it would cut my trip down to Kunming a day or two short so I want to talk to the Hemmats and Calvin to see how long I should plan to be down there and if I can cut this internship short. I'm really not doing anything.
I've actually been productive today. I finished the FAQ page and looked through the rest. I was using all my comm school communications training to fix it... checking readability statistics, increasing white space, parallel structures, using different fonts for headings (yay Ariel...). Who knew I'd use that again? Actually, it's probably the most useful part of Comm school.
So it's 2pm. Haven't gotten lunch yet. This morning we went to this morning market (zaoshi) which was cool. Just rows and rows of fruit and vegetable sellers plus people making all sorts of street food. We had this doufu soupy thing that has pepper and stuff (super spicey) plus this corn bun with carrot inside and... this pancake thing with veggies inside... anyway, it was really good. I wish I'd brought my camera to the morning market because it was quite a sight.
Anyway, people come back tomorrow so maybe I can figure out more to do with my time here. A teacher from last summer at IES asked me to be an orientation leader this year, which would be cool... you get a free tshirt and everything! hehe. Anyway, I told him probably since it would cut my trip down to Kunming a day or two short so I want to talk to the Hemmats and Calvin to see how long I should plan to be down there and if I can cut this internship short. I'm really not doing anything.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
mmm... so CHUEE...
so I'm sitting in a cubicle on the 5th floor of the China World Trade Center (Tower 2) on a tiny little Dell laptop they lent me that is soooo much faster than my old Toshiba so I've taken quite nicely to it. This is such a random job.
So I showed up yesterday morning and they're like hey! um. everyone's at the conference so you can settle in here (a conference room) and we'll try to get you a computer. That's it. no instruction or anything... and that's where I sat until about noon when the computer actually came. That was 3 quality hours of listening to Harry Potter on my iPod. Then we went for lunch and met with some of the team members (there are only about 9 in total) and met Calvin Xu (the guy I'm working for) for the first time. He's a friend of my dad's from Pace Global where they used to work and could have sworn he'd met me before, but he hadn't. He then suggested that I attend the conference so they usher me in and give me a headset so I could listen to the translator (ok that was kind of cool) and I got to listen to hours and hours of people talking about greenhouse gas emission reductions. This could have been really cool, unfortunately I was really tired and the translators had especially dull and uneventful voices. After a coffee break I got much better. I wrote down a few highlights from the conference on my notepad... let's see...
oh, this guy was talking about the gas their generators use or produce or something but he kept on talking about "coke" and how they're working on producing "coke" and how "coking" is so important. I was very confused. Turns out he was talking about cooking gas. go figure. um what else. Oh, someone was trying to emphasize going through the government to get their support but the way they pronounced legal made it come out as illegal ("eh-legal" i guess) every time and that amused me greatly.
ok it was funnier yesterday, seriously. and i was really tired. i must not have wrote it down in a funny way :P
Oh so I didn't mention what CHUEE is. I've been working on editing their website all day so I think I have a handle on it now. So China asked the IFC (International Finance Corporation.. the private sector arm of the World Bank) to create a new program/finance initiative based on energy efficiency or renewable energy. The IFC created CHUEE (China Utility-based Energy Efficiency Finance Program) organizes energy utilities, energy efficiency equipment and services suppliers and financial instituations to create networks that support energy efficiency. basically. I've been reading about it all day and it's all starting to blur together.
Anyway, I don't really have a set task here. Calvin mentioned I could look over the website to see if it needs editing (the english site is kept up by the in-office staff) and so I've decided to increase it's skim value (hehehe, yay comm school!) I spent today on the FAQ. (and catching up on some tv... oops.) it's so hard to stay focused here. it's me and 2 secretaries plus a 'real' intern while everyone else is traveling to different sites for the conference.
soooo yeah. I'm stalling before I leave since Maryam moved into a new apartment yesterday and there's no internet there yet. It's a really sweet apartment though. it's now a 25 kuai taxi ride away (roughly $3) which isn't as nice as being able to walk, but oh well. It's a nice place to hang out. I should probably leave soon, though. It's like me and one other person... and that's Calvin's personal secretary so she probably has real work to do. I think she's writing a speech for him right now.
Sigh I guess I should get home. I even ran out of shows to watch. Recently I've caught up in Heroes, Grey's and Gilmore Girls. (thanks fanpop.com!) so I guess I should just go. Blah.
So I showed up yesterday morning and they're like hey! um. everyone's at the conference so you can settle in here (a conference room) and we'll try to get you a computer. That's it. no instruction or anything... and that's where I sat until about noon when the computer actually came. That was 3 quality hours of listening to Harry Potter on my iPod. Then we went for lunch and met with some of the team members (there are only about 9 in total) and met Calvin Xu (the guy I'm working for) for the first time. He's a friend of my dad's from Pace Global where they used to work and could have sworn he'd met me before, but he hadn't. He then suggested that I attend the conference so they usher me in and give me a headset so I could listen to the translator (ok that was kind of cool) and I got to listen to hours and hours of people talking about greenhouse gas emission reductions. This could have been really cool, unfortunately I was really tired and the translators had especially dull and uneventful voices. After a coffee break I got much better. I wrote down a few highlights from the conference on my notepad... let's see...
oh, this guy was talking about the gas their generators use or produce or something but he kept on talking about "coke" and how they're working on producing "coke" and how "coking" is so important. I was very confused. Turns out he was talking about cooking gas. go figure. um what else. Oh, someone was trying to emphasize going through the government to get their support but the way they pronounced legal made it come out as illegal ("eh-legal" i guess) every time and that amused me greatly.
ok it was funnier yesterday, seriously. and i was really tired. i must not have wrote it down in a funny way :P
Oh so I didn't mention what CHUEE is. I've been working on editing their website all day so I think I have a handle on it now. So China asked the IFC (International Finance Corporation.. the private sector arm of the World Bank) to create a new program/finance initiative based on energy efficiency or renewable energy. The IFC created CHUEE (China Utility-based Energy Efficiency Finance Program) organizes energy utilities, energy efficiency equipment and services suppliers and financial instituations to create networks that support energy efficiency. basically. I've been reading about it all day and it's all starting to blur together.
Anyway, I don't really have a set task here. Calvin mentioned I could look over the website to see if it needs editing (the english site is kept up by the in-office staff) and so I've decided to increase it's skim value (hehehe, yay comm school!) I spent today on the FAQ. (and catching up on some tv... oops.) it's so hard to stay focused here. it's me and 2 secretaries plus a 'real' intern while everyone else is traveling to different sites for the conference.
soooo yeah. I'm stalling before I leave since Maryam moved into a new apartment yesterday and there's no internet there yet. It's a really sweet apartment though. it's now a 25 kuai taxi ride away (roughly $3) which isn't as nice as being able to walk, but oh well. It's a nice place to hang out. I should probably leave soon, though. It's like me and one other person... and that's Calvin's personal secretary so she probably has real work to do. I think she's writing a speech for him right now.
Sigh I guess I should get home. I even ran out of shows to watch. Recently I've caught up in Heroes, Grey's and Gilmore Girls. (thanks fanpop.com!) so I guess I should just go. Blah.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Religion in China...?
so it's been awhile since i've really been involved with the Baha'is or really felt all that connected to it. so it's really strange that of all places, China pulls me back in. I just sat through a four hour study circle in Chinese. And we had a devotional before that. It's the strangest thing though... even though it's in a completely different language and culture, it still felt the same. crazy.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Last night in Shanghai and First night in Beijing!
ok so things are going to get a little tricky chronologically here. I figure as long as I'm trying to catch up, I can't just write about what I'm thinking now. SO. I have a few empty posts that I'll go back and edit to keep things in a generally correct order but for now I just want to talk about, well, now.
So I spent a lot of yesterday dealing with where I'd be sleeping tonight. Calvin Xu (who I'll be working for) hadn't been able to find a place for me yet. I had contacted Casey from the Beijing Club dinner and he and his girlfriend offered their place for atleast the time being (later extended to atleast a week), but my parents weren't all that comfortable with that. Either way, we decided it'd probably be fine for a little while and I told them I'd be coming. Then my parents find an old email that some how slipped through the cracks from some really good family friends (The Hemmats) who are now living in the Yunan province in the southwest part of China. A Baha'i friend of theirs lives in Beijing and had agreed to house me. The email had been sent about 2 weeks ago, lol. So I went from nowhere to stay to too many places! All this got dropped on me while I was supposed to be walking out the door to our final group dinner so I couldn't really deal with it then (I was also talking to my parents a lot... and the time difference between here and there plus the fact that phone calls don't work between China and where they work plus they're cooky schedule makes this hard).
So dinner was fun. It took me like a good half hour to get a cab, but the drive to the Bund at night is cool with all the lit up buildings so it was a nice ride. We ate at M on the Bund which is on the roof of building 5. Everyone was just taking tons of pictures (I'll add some soon, they're still on my camera which is still in my luggage) and the food was delicious, expensive and ridiculously western. Not something I would have gotten myself, but since UVA was paying I was all for it!
From there we got a bunch of people to go to KTV. (Karaoke) and so we went back to the place we'd gone on Tuesday night. It was a lot more crowded and we had Hun Woo there. He claims that every single Korean family in the US has a karaoke machine in their basement for entertaining. It showed. While we mostly just picked songs that everybody knew and passed the mic around singing, Hun Woo picked songs for himself to rock out to, lol. Definitely a side of him I'd never seen.
From there, everyone was going to a club or bar or something so I decided to go back with Patrick to the faculty club. I was tired from being up late the night before talking to my parents and having people in my room until after 1 plus I needed to be alert the next day. Everyone else was just getting on 13 hours flights and could just crash, but I was flying to Beijing and would need to have my wits about me. I was really out of it the rest of the night. I was so sleepy I'd just go in and out of sleep, trying to call people and email people and then Jennifer was comign in and out and Patrick stopped by to get his thumb drive and I was just very much in a daze.
Today I got up at about 6. at 7 I went downstairs to say goodbye to Patrick, Shefali and Brian. at 9 I said goodbye to Professor Maxham, Andrew Baker, Mesouda, Judith and Stephanie. I then just kept on packing until quarter of 11 when I bid my roomie goodbye and went to get the front desk to call a cab.
The airport was a bit of an ordeal. I'd never checked in to a domestic flight on my own here. I couldnt find the check-in counter, first of all. and my bags were freaking heavy. 16 kgs over the weight limit in fact. and I think the lady rounded down substantially for me. a kg is 2.2 lbs, right? so 16 kgs = about 35 pounds... I feel like the scale said my luggage weighed atleast 45 kgs. Which is ridiculous. That's just the luggage I checked. It was quite the little system they had set up for paying for going over the weight limit. the counter kept my boarding ticket hostage while i took a little form to a counter on the other side of the room. she calculated how much i owed, gave me another form and sent me to another counter in the room. that guy took my money, sent me back to the second counter who took my form, did something with it and then sent me back to the original check-in counter. that might not sound complicated to you, but add in all the chinese people with no sense of a line (aka they cut you if you're not aggressive) plust he general high anxiety level associated with airports and it's a less than comfortable situation.
i got to the gate at about 12 for a 1pm flight. i started reading The World is Flat. I originally bought it because it seemed like a 'responsible' read. It almost got left in Shanghai because it's so freaking thick and I didn't think it could make it with all my stuff. Luckily I brought it because it's actually turning out pretty good.
the flight boarded... they managed to put the 4 white people on the plane together. i'm not sure if that was on purpose. my seat was pretty near the front and on the aisle considering i'd just bought the ticket on thursday. that's really all i can tell you about the flight because i was asleep instantly and woke up when the plane hit the ground in Beijing.
The cab driver that took me to Maryam's place was really cute. She and I talked (atleast a little... my chinese is super rusty) and talked to Maryam on the phone to get directions. when she couldn't figure out how to actually pull up to the building she got out and scurried around to ask people. so cute.
i finally got all my luggage in (through a revolving door, mind you) and got upstairs. Maryam has such a sweet apartment! we sat and chatted for awhile and then i used her wireless internet to blog and send out a mass email about the blog :)
we went out for dinner and then went for massages. 45 kuai for the both of us and they were sooo much better than the ones Karen and I got last week. They even massaged my head (and my eyebrows!). So yeah. I'm not sure what's on the agenda for tomorrow. I was thinking about heading over to the Silk Market to get some good shoes for work tomorrow. Oh well, off to bed!
So I spent a lot of yesterday dealing with where I'd be sleeping tonight. Calvin Xu (who I'll be working for) hadn't been able to find a place for me yet. I had contacted Casey from the Beijing Club dinner and he and his girlfriend offered their place for atleast the time being (later extended to atleast a week), but my parents weren't all that comfortable with that. Either way, we decided it'd probably be fine for a little while and I told them I'd be coming. Then my parents find an old email that some how slipped through the cracks from some really good family friends (The Hemmats) who are now living in the Yunan province in the southwest part of China. A Baha'i friend of theirs lives in Beijing and had agreed to house me. The email had been sent about 2 weeks ago, lol. So I went from nowhere to stay to too many places! All this got dropped on me while I was supposed to be walking out the door to our final group dinner so I couldn't really deal with it then (I was also talking to my parents a lot... and the time difference between here and there plus the fact that phone calls don't work between China and where they work plus they're cooky schedule makes this hard).
So dinner was fun. It took me like a good half hour to get a cab, but the drive to the Bund at night is cool with all the lit up buildings so it was a nice ride. We ate at M on the Bund which is on the roof of building 5. Everyone was just taking tons of pictures (I'll add some soon, they're still on my camera which is still in my luggage) and the food was delicious, expensive and ridiculously western. Not something I would have gotten myself, but since UVA was paying I was all for it!
From there we got a bunch of people to go to KTV. (Karaoke) and so we went back to the place we'd gone on Tuesday night. It was a lot more crowded and we had Hun Woo there. He claims that every single Korean family in the US has a karaoke machine in their basement for entertaining. It showed. While we mostly just picked songs that everybody knew and passed the mic around singing, Hun Woo picked songs for himself to rock out to, lol. Definitely a side of him I'd never seen.
From there, everyone was going to a club or bar or something so I decided to go back with Patrick to the faculty club. I was tired from being up late the night before talking to my parents and having people in my room until after 1 plus I needed to be alert the next day. Everyone else was just getting on 13 hours flights and could just crash, but I was flying to Beijing and would need to have my wits about me. I was really out of it the rest of the night. I was so sleepy I'd just go in and out of sleep, trying to call people and email people and then Jennifer was comign in and out and Patrick stopped by to get his thumb drive and I was just very much in a daze.
Today I got up at about 6. at 7 I went downstairs to say goodbye to Patrick, Shefali and Brian. at 9 I said goodbye to Professor Maxham, Andrew Baker, Mesouda, Judith and Stephanie. I then just kept on packing until quarter of 11 when I bid my roomie goodbye and went to get the front desk to call a cab.
The airport was a bit of an ordeal. I'd never checked in to a domestic flight on my own here. I couldnt find the check-in counter, first of all. and my bags were freaking heavy. 16 kgs over the weight limit in fact. and I think the lady rounded down substantially for me. a kg is 2.2 lbs, right? so 16 kgs = about 35 pounds... I feel like the scale said my luggage weighed atleast 45 kgs. Which is ridiculous. That's just the luggage I checked. It was quite the little system they had set up for paying for going over the weight limit. the counter kept my boarding ticket hostage while i took a little form to a counter on the other side of the room. she calculated how much i owed, gave me another form and sent me to another counter in the room. that guy took my money, sent me back to the second counter who took my form, did something with it and then sent me back to the original check-in counter. that might not sound complicated to you, but add in all the chinese people with no sense of a line (aka they cut you if you're not aggressive) plust he general high anxiety level associated with airports and it's a less than comfortable situation.
i got to the gate at about 12 for a 1pm flight. i started reading The World is Flat. I originally bought it because it seemed like a 'responsible' read. It almost got left in Shanghai because it's so freaking thick and I didn't think it could make it with all my stuff. Luckily I brought it because it's actually turning out pretty good.
the flight boarded... they managed to put the 4 white people on the plane together. i'm not sure if that was on purpose. my seat was pretty near the front and on the aisle considering i'd just bought the ticket on thursday. that's really all i can tell you about the flight because i was asleep instantly and woke up when the plane hit the ground in Beijing.
The cab driver that took me to Maryam's place was really cute. She and I talked (atleast a little... my chinese is super rusty) and talked to Maryam on the phone to get directions. when she couldn't figure out how to actually pull up to the building she got out and scurried around to ask people. so cute.
i finally got all my luggage in (through a revolving door, mind you) and got upstairs. Maryam has such a sweet apartment! we sat and chatted for awhile and then i used her wireless internet to blog and send out a mass email about the blog :)
we went out for dinner and then went for massages. 45 kuai for the both of us and they were sooo much better than the ones Karen and I got last week. They even massaged my head (and my eyebrows!). So yeah. I'm not sure what's on the agenda for tomorrow. I was thinking about heading over to the Silk Market to get some good shoes for work tomorrow. Oh well, off to bed!
My Last Week in Shanghai
This week was overall pretty uneventful. Everyone was going shopping for last minute presents and I began to ponder over where I would be living for the three weeks following the culmination of the class. to be continued.
Weekend trip to Beijing!
So we took a four-day trip to tour around Beijing (doesn't this class sound hard?) over the weekend. We left the faculty club at 6am. yeah. I guess that was to get us into Beijing by 11ish. We were greeted by 'Jerry' our tour guide and got on the bus. While everyone was ready to stop at the hotel, change/rest whatever (like the itinerary said), we went straight to lunch and then straight to the Summer Palace.
I was excited to go to the Summer Palace. I some how managed not to go last summer and really wanted to see it. Jerry really did the fastest tour of life. we BOOKED it through. I didn't really learn much about it either except that the Qing dynasty would come here in the summer... the 'Chinese unicorn' is this lion thing with antlers and a horse's tail and scales and a bunch of other stuff... and the summer palace has the longest corridor or a long corridor or something. 
(Hence the picture of how shocked I was at its length...) From there we headed back to the hotel to shower and get ready for dinner. The UVA Beijing Club (comprised of uva grads in beijing) had contacted professor maxham to set up a dinner/get together that night. It seemed perfect for me to make some connections to pre-empt my summer in Beijing. We went to this Thai place and I sat across from this guy Casey. He's lived here since.. January... and offered to help me find a place to stay! So that was cool. Beyond that I met this guy who's son is coming for the summer w/his gf (they just graduated college) and said to get in touch with him if I want to meet them. Plus I got the business card of the head of the club so I can keep in touch when I go back to Beijing.
(to be continued)
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
The first 10 days...
so sorry I haven't gotten this blog up until now. i only just figured out how to get it out of chinese, lol. i've made general notes in my notebook about what i've been doing so i could get ya'll up to date so here goes...
(DONE)
(DONE)
5/10-11
so getting out of cville was a huge pain. luckily i have amazing friends and family to help me through it. ryan basically packed my room while i packed for china. a bunch of my sisters have offered to help me tie up loose ends (aka random crap) that i've left behind. i made it to BWI (my awesome uncle drove me) at like 430am. They claim you need like 90 minutes to check in and go through security. I got through in under 10 minutes. I guess it doesn't apply that early in the morning. nothing was open so i sat around reading and wondering if any of these other people flying to toronto were continuing on to China too. (they weren't. i was the only person connecting anywhere.)
so getting out of cville was a huge pain. luckily i have amazing friends and family to help me through it. ryan basically packed my room while i packed for china. a bunch of my sisters have offered to help me tie up loose ends (aka random crap) that i've left behind. i made it to BWI (my awesome uncle drove me) at like 430am. They claim you need like 90 minutes to check in and go through security. I got through in under 10 minutes. I guess it doesn't apply that early in the morning. nothing was open so i sat around reading and wondering if any of these other people flying to toronto were continuing on to China too. (they weren't. i was the only person connecting anywhere.)
when they finally started boarding, i handed the woman my boarding pass and she was like "oh! you're all alone?? and you're so young! you're going this far?!?!" and i was like, uhhh i'm actually continuing on to china. and i've gone before. and she was like "good for you!" like i was 8. i guess i had my hair in braids with a backwards baseball cap on... but still. anyway, i walk out onto the platform to see this awaiting me.
I think it's the smallest plane I've ever seen. I half expected there to be pedals under all our seats to get into the air. The flight was fine... at Toronto I found out this guy Shawn from the marketing program was on my flight to China so we got some breakfast and boarded the plane. The flight wasn't really that bad. There were some really strange movies/TV shows on the flight... some Twilight Zone and stuff. But I got to see Dreamgirls so it wasn't so bad. Some random Chinese man across the aisle from me gave me his info and told me to come visit him in his province, haha. I took his info to avoid giving him mine. I conveniently enough told him I didn't have a number, address OR email in China. yeah.At the airport we waited for like an hour for about 20 people who were flying in together with our professor then we set off for Shanghai Jiao Tong University (or SJTU, as they say.) We regrouped and headed out for dinner. Immediately I saw problems. One, nobody on this trip knows Chinese or has even been to China before. Two, there were 35 foreigners wandering the street in Shanghai wanting to eat together. They all migrated towards KFC and I was tired (not having slept yet) so I walked back with one girl and got some noodles and then went to sleep.
5/12
One thing that's struck me is how at east I feel in this country. It doesn't really strike me as a different place from home. Well, it's obviously different because my friends aren't here... but I can live here just as normally as I do in the states, I think. huh.
Anyway, today we went to the Yu Gardens (Yu Yuan). My roommate and I got separated from everybody else so we wandered around the market surrounding the garden, got some food and then headed in. On the plus side, I found Patrick inside! I hadn't seen him since before Winter Break so that was a nice surprise. On the other hand, I'd been to this garden before. And it looked like every other garden in China.
Oh well, guess I need to be prepared to relive past events. We all taxi-ed over to this restaurant afterwards which was pure chaos. Maxham asked for my help almost immediately to sort some stuff out with the bill setup. He then said that everyone would order their own dishes since he didn't know people's preferences. I explained that (especially at this restaurant) you were supposed to do family-style and then helped him order the meal. (some of these crazy comm schoolers requested that i order general tso's chicken. i kid you not.) Then somebody had already lost his wallet so I talked to the head waiter guy to track down the taxi they'd taken and get the driver to bring the wallet by... luckily that worked out. The waiter also brought by a basket full of fish to make sure I approved of them. I did. Anyway, that was an interesting meal because it was then that I realized nobody (including the professor) knew what to expect or what they were supposed to do here. Nobody else knowing Chinese put a lot of reliance on me that night that I was not prepared for (my Chinese is pretty rusty.) That night everybody went out and I went to sleep... this city makes me really sleepy.
5/13
Today was interesting. I went wandering with some people just to see what we'd find. We ended up having lunch at this little jiaoziguanr (dumpling restaurant). It was interesting because I was ordering but I couldn't read the menu, lol. So was basically just like "so... (in chinese) ... we have 5 people. and we want dumplings. pork dumplings. i don't know how many. what do you think? oh and what are those? oo they look good we'll take 15 of those too." lol so that worked out. then after we ordered you're supposed to just go sit and they bring the food to you, but I figured there had to be more to the system then that so I was like uhh.. what do we do now? so this manager guy took us upstairs, "encouraged" this elderly couple that was almost done eating to leave the table so we could sit and they brought us the food. I'm not even going to tell you what a headache it was to try and get them to get us boxes to go since we were running late. Oh well, it was an experience and everybody enjoyed the dumplings.
It was a whole room! you can see some people standing up on a platform in the background for scale. It was just as dizzying in person as it is in this picture. I guess if I think Shanghai is too busy for me now, I should never ever go back because it won't get anything but worse, lol.
After the museum we went to the bund for more cliche pictures on the water (like this one!)
Then we headed back to the Faculty Club where we're staying to have our formal dinner 
reception. We sat in our 3 person groups for our class projects and with one Chinese student from SJTU. Everyone (but me) had been out until like 5am atleast the night before so I think everybody in my group was too tired to make conversation. The girl assigned to us was decent at english, but not great. If she didn't know a word she'd turn to me and say it in Chinese and half the time I'd be like uhh... right.... but then I'd be really proud of myself if I did know the word, lol. Anyway, after dinner everyone went to finish reading the first section of the book Billions that we were supposed to be reading and went to sleep. Nothing too exciting really.
5/14
Our first day of class. sigh. We had a Chinese speaker (one of our only ones) to talk about market research. It really wasn't anything we hadn't learned before except a little more difficult to understand (his accent, not the material.) He went off about this yin-yang concept that applies to food. Apparently Chinese people see food as "hot" "cold" or "mild". People kept on asking questions like "so why are crabs hot food and shrimp cold food?" and stuff like that and the guy was like "well I can't really tell you WHY.. they just ARE." and that just prompted more questions. Needless to say, the presentation dragged a little. We had another presentation after lunch... I don't remember anything exciting about it.
After class some of us decided to try and go to the Jade Buddha temple, but by the time we got our act together it was like 4 and temples in China close at 5. Anisha had the great idea of wanting to go to the aquarium which supposedly closed at 9, so we did. Turns out it closes at 7 and it was 615 when we made it out there. So we decided to walk over to the river to take a look at the Bund from the Pudong side. We took pictures, of course. People think it's strange that I
like to take pictures of funny signs, but they're just too funny! Rumor has it that Beijing is trying to fix all their signage for the Olympics. bummer. I'll have to take all the pictures i can for posterity's sake. Anyway, we killed some time and went and got dinner at a Thai place in the Super Brand Mall nearby. It was soooo hard to decide what to get! Some people wanted Pizza Hut, some wanted expensive stuff, some wanted simple... and of course nobody wanted to split up (I thought it was a good suggestion!) Anyway, after dinner we walked back to take pictures on the river at night (hence the origin of my picture on the right side of my blog.) Then we took what's called the "sightseeing tunnel" to the other side. I can only liken it to the boat ride from the original Willy Wonka movie. Seriously.
None of the pictures came out great, but you get the idea. We came out on the other side of the river, took more pictures and went home. I *meant* to actually go out that night... but I fell asleep instead. Something about this town seriously makes me sleepy. Probably the smog. Dude. did you know that on any given day 25% of the smog in L.A. can be attributed to China? How crazy is that??5/15
Today we had two speakers for class. blah. super exciting, right? They talked a little more about market strategy in China, which was a little more interesting. I made more contacts, got some cards... the guy from the Monitor Group lives in Beijing so that might be useful.
We made it to the Jade Buddha Temple today. I'd been before, but thought it'd be interesting to see with 6 more years under my belt.
People kept on thinking they'd seen the Jade Buddha. For instance, this statue to the left is NOT the jade buddha. Some people didn't get that, lol. I was like well did you pay the 10 kuai to go into a room upstairs where you can't take pictures? nooooo... ok then you haven't seen it yet, hehe. It's still pretty cool. Really pretty. We also went upstairs to a tea room. You get a free little tea ceremony/sampling thing with the ticket purchase. Afterwards they're actually pretty low pressure about buying anything, but if you do no bargaining (the proceeds go to the temple.) I gave in and bought some. I also walked by this calligrapher guy who was pretty funny. He spoke in english but then switched to spanish when some europeans came by. I kept on switching with him between the three languages (those and chinese) and he got confused as to where i was actually from. Anyway, I got him to paint a cool little scroll with my name and the character for dance. why dance, you ask? well I was wearing my Virginia Drumline tshirt and I was trying to explain what it was. Unfortunately, how I learned to say play drums (qiao gu) sounds very similar to dance (tiao wu) and I didn't feel like explaining it furhter. Plus I like the character for dance. So that's a pretty sweet scroll. Definitely one of the things I've wanted and hadn't gotten (my chinese name in calligraphy.) That night was basically just hanging out (I started watching the show Heroes. waaay too addicting) and researching for our project on the computer industry in China.5/16
Today we had our first "company visit" at Volkswagon. Sweet, eh? Yeah we thought so too so we put on semi-actual business casual and were all set for a behing the scenes something or other.
Nope.
We did, however, get to ride in these cool car thingies like what you'd be in to explore a studio or something. They drove us through some manufacturing areas and that's about it. Then we were done and stood around for awhile. We were all expecting something more. but no. lol.
The rest of the afternoon was pretty cool, though. We went to this place called the Coffee Tree which was started by an '86 Comm School grad. It's a sweet little spot for expats to go and have coffee and panini sandwiches (sandwiches are oddly hard to find in China. Which sucks because I think I've decided sandwiches are my favorite food. sigh. I miss the Market.)
Anyway, the guy that started it is pretty cool. Sounds a lot like me in what he did during school and what he wanted to do afterwards. I just hope I'm as freaking sucessful as he is.
Anyway, the rest of the day was probably just working on the project and watching Heroes, as far as I can remember. The project was due on Friday morning so we were trying to do that early.
(Patrick and Chris at the Coffee Tree)
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