(DONE)
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.)
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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