Kindergarden Day at the Post Office

Today Zhao Laoshi took us to the post office to show us how to mail a letter. We were supposed to write letters to each other for homework and then bring them to class for the trip. If you walked in to that post office when we were there you would think 6 five year olds were making their first attempt to mail something. First we had to write the address in all Chinese. Of course, we all put the name of the receiver first which you're not supposed to do here. The address goes first and then the name so on my envelope the address was towards the top instead of being in the middle. Then we couldn't read the address that Zhao Laoshi had written down so we all guessed as to what characters they were. She came around to each of us during this process and told us we had wrong characters here and wrong characters there so then our envelope had scratches and lines all over it. Next came the stamps. They had a tub of glue with a paintbrush in it to put on the back of a 1 inch stamp. All of the boys put way too much glue on their stamp and preceded to get glue all over the front of their envelopes and then on the back to seal it. I couldn't stop laughing during this entire process. My stamp ended up covering part of the address because it was at the top of the envelope so you couldn't read the last 3 characters. If anyone actually receives their letter it will be a miracle.

Another interesting note, Selina and I have noticed recently that Ruby never, and I mean NEVER, has homework. Every night when we are slaving away on Chinese she watches TV or does stuff on her computer. We asked her about it last night and she said that in college they do almost no work outside the classroom but in high school their schedules were very demanding. She would go to school from 6am-10pm every day and wouldn't have any holidays. But at Fudan she could skip half of her classes each semester and the teachers wouldn't even notice. She also sleeps through most of her classes. She thinks it's very strange that we have so much work here and when we told her how much work we have in the states she looked shocked. She said she's starting to rethink going to grad school in the states :)

Not much else to report. Selina and I are going to look for small travel bags for our week long trip because we don't want to lug around our huge luggage. I don't know when we'll have time for a trip downtown but we'll figure it out!

I Love Fruit!!!

So after eating dumplings, noodles, rice, and pork for two weeks I went and bought bananas and apples this week. I can honestly say that I have never had better bananas or apples in my life. Selina said I had a look of absolute ecstasy on my face when I ate an apple yesterday :) And to make it even better, Ruby's grandfather, who's 90 by the way, raises bees and makes real 100% homemade honey. She brought some back from her house and I put some on an apple this morning... absolutely delightful :) There is a small market right next to our apartments that sells fruit for a really good price so I will be stopping there weekly. Oh, and I learned the word for peanut which I was major excited about. They have dishes of peanuts here at most restaurants and you can ask for it in rice and noodles and stuff, I've never seen peanuts so readily available, it's kind of fantastic. I'm also sure that one of the things I will miss most when I leave China will be the street food. We had it for dinner last night and for lunch today and, I shall dare to say it, I believe it to be better than P.F. Changs... I think I can hear the shocked gasps from all the way over here...

We had our first test today, I did pretty well on the oral section of the exam but the written part was quite a different story. Now I know that these tests require about 5 times as much preparation as I gave it last night. Oh well, now I know :)

We got our schedules for our week long group trip next week. We are going to Xi'an province, a 20 hour train ride, and then we are going to several other places by train and bus. We will be exhausted by the time we get back but it sounds like so much fun! We are going up to higher elevations so it will be colder, which I am looking forward to :) We leave on Friday at 4pm and get back on Saturday. It will also be nice not to have class for a week.

Tomorrow Selina and I want to go downtown in the morning and look around and shop. We both want to get a coat custom made while we're here. Some people are getting cashmere coats made but that's too fancy for me, I would like a leather jacket with bizarre colored lining on the inside though. I know that pictures of Walmart are in high demand so I promise to have some up the by the end of the weekend :)

A Very Like, Very Interesting Day :)

Well today held many events that I will not forget anytime soon. The most prominent being an old man offering to pay me for "entertainment" while we were walking around downtown. We walked by him and he started to follow me and held out a 10 kuai (about $1.50) bill and smiled at me in a very creepy way and kept following me until my emphatic negative nods finally dissuaded him. He did not offer this invitation to anyone else which made me the object of every joke for the rest of the day... and probably for many days to come.

We arrived downtown around 3pm and went to Zapata's for Mexican food and all you can drink margaritas. It's a good thing we went with extreme skepticism and without high expectations because the mexican food was not mexican food. They had cheeseburgers and hot dogs. We were shocked that they didn't even have chips and salsa. We hung out there for about 3 hours drinking margaritas and then headed out to Nanjing Road, a very popular shopping spot. We were too tired to haggle today but we scoped out a few good places to return to.

Tomorrow Selina and might invest in a bike. I could possibly die while riding a bike here because I don't think any of the drivers have gone through driver's ed but I think it won't be a true Chinese experience unless I get one. Besides, the risk is part of the fun :) I'm also going to Walmart to get a lot of fruit. That's what I miss the most right now, a good fruit bowl in the mornings.

Make sure you guys are being safe with all the bad weather coming in!!!

I Survived!!!

It's amazing to me how being immersed in a language can develop your learning abilities in just a week. On Monday I was struggling to understand anything our professors were saying and as each day passed I understood more and more. I actually feel like I've accomplished something huge just because I can understand when she assigns us homework or asks us questions on the grammar. Our professors are both very nice but the second one kind of scares me. She has a withering stare that she gives you when she can tell you haven't memorized the dialogues. I know this because I only memorized half of the dialogue today and I definitely got nailed to the wall with it. Lesson learned :)

This weekend we are going to the Urban Planning Center and then we plan to stay downtown to shop and sight see. It will be nice to take a break from our homework which takes a minimum of 3 hours every night. We don't have class on Monday because they are celebrating the Autumn Moon Festival, hooray for a three day weekend!!!

Oh, I forgot to tell y'all about an excursion I took the other day. There is a street near our apartments where I get an egg pancake some mornings and I walked down it the other day on the way back form class. I was taken aback by how peaceful this street seemed when all around there were cars honking and bike bells ringing. There was classical Chinese music playing from a small store and many small apartments where families lived. Most of there belongings were outside the dwelling because the rooms were so small and all the cooking was done outside as well. I felt more at peace on that tiny, unfashionable street than I have anywhere else in the city. The combination of the music, lack of traffic noise, and small families running about made it more real than anything I have seen thus far.

And can I say how great it is to have an AWESOME roommate while studying abroad. It's so nice to walk to class everyday and eat our baozi, talk about class or family or whatever, and never get tired of the other person. It makes things soooo much easier :)

A Home, Not A Hotel

Well, class today was about the same today as it was yesterday. Really hard and really confusing. It felt good to get out of there and have the rest of the afternoon off. We ate lunch at a Japanese place and ate noodles with bamboo shoots and steak. The bamboo shoots were surprisingly good. With the rest of the day to burn Selina and I decided that we wanted to make our rooms more homey. Our sheets are white, our walls are white, and the florescent light just makes everything look even whiter so we opted to make a journey across town to IKEA.

We took the bus to the subway and took about a 15 minute ride to a part of town that we haven't been to yet. Of course on the map IKEA looks like it's right across the street from the station but we definitely started in the wrong direction, got redirected, and found IKEA about 20 minutes from the station after winding through many roads and almost colliding with many cars. Once we arrived we looked for a duvet cover and some rugs to add some color. As I stood in front of the many selections I thought about matching everything and then just decided to get the most bizarre and colorful rugs and blankets I could find. I selected a multicolored rug for my room and bathroom and a very colorful duvet cover. I even got a poster with a bunch of neon signs on it :) I added pics of each of our rooms to commemorate how happy we were to have personal touches to our rooms. Now it feels like we live here, which is nice.

Tomorrow I don't have class until 1:30 so I think I will get up, eat breakfast, and explore the campus shops and surrounding area. I will let you know what I find :)

Oh, and here is my picture sight in case I forgot to send it to someone http://www.flickr.com/photos/29895521@N02/

Love y'all!!!

Let the Classes Begin

So today was the first day of class... yeah... this semester is gonna be a doozy. 

We have 3 hours of Chinese from 8:40 to 11:30 4 days a week and one on one sessions with our professors one day a week. Learning Chinese grammar in Chinese is, to say the least, intense. Our teachers refuse to speak English to us so there is a lot of repetition going on and befuddled looks about the room. I'm placed in the second level with a good group of people so it should be ok. We also have a Contemporary Chinese culture class, which is very involved, on Mondays and Thursdays. We will be making field studies to different parts of the city, we'll have guest lectures from locals, and we have a major capstone project at the end of the term. We have to select a topic related to Chinese culture and do a very involved field study and write a final essay. Again, very intense. I also have a Chinese Economics class on Wednesdays so I will let you know how that goes.

After our culture class I took my first trip to a DVD store. Kind of like the bookstore, I was in heaven. I spent 66 kuai ($11) on 4 DVDs and the 4th season of The Office. I plan to make a few more trips to that store :)

Scavenger Hunt

Hold your breath folks, this is a long one...

Saturday morning we got up and went in search of somewhere new to eat breakfast. We ended up getting dumplings from a street vendor for 1 kuai each and they were absolutely delicious. It will definitely be a frequent breakfast stop! We ate on the move because our Chinese roommates were arriving in the morning. Our roommate got here around 11. Her name is Ruby and she lives very close to campus. She intends to go to grad school in the US to specialize in translation studies and comparative literature. Like all of the roommates we have met she is extremely ambitious.

After the roommates moved in, we went to lunch and then embarked on our scavenger hunt of downtown Shanghai. My group consisted of Ruby, Selina, me, Bill, Joe, and Michael, their Fudan roommate. Bill is from Philly and attends Villanova and Joe goes to the University of Minnesota. Michael speaks English extremely well which allowed him to appreciate my very unique sense of humor ;) We took our first public bus ride from campus to the metro station so we could purchase transportation cards. The bus ride was about 20 minutes and very crowded. Michael asked me many questions like what Americans do on weekends, what I thought of the writers strike, and what 3 movies I would bring with me if I was stranded on an island. I had a very hard time answering that one :)

When we arrived at the station we went down below and got our transportation cards which we can use in cabs, the bus, or the metro. They will definitely come in handy. After our purchases, we began the scavenger hunt. We were supposed to find a bunch of places on a list and ask locals questions but we ended up walking aimlessly around downtown for three hours :) I became extremely excited when we came to an enormous building and Michael informed me that it was a bookstore. We went inside and to put it quite simply, I was in heaven. It's seven stories and has books in just about every language imaginable. I think I will pack provisions, buy 3 new luggage bags, and empty my bank account all in one day at that store. I'm not sure how I'll eat for the rest of the trip but at least I'll be thoroughly entertained :)

We eventually came to the Huangpu River crossing to Pudong. We took the ferry across the river, got off, realized we didn't have time to explore, turned around, and got right back on the ferry :) We met with the rest of the program people at a coffee shop where i had a delicious mango smoothie. During the hunt, Bill had mentioned that he was going to a classical music concert at the Shanghai Concert Hall. Since the nightlife in Shanghai doesn't pick up until around midnight, and because I love live music, I decided to go with Bill to the concert. We left the coffee shop to go find the theater before dinner to make sure we could get tickets. Bill had a street map and took us down the street, then down some other streets, through a park, and then in a big circle. He felt very foolish when we discovered the theater right across a very big and very busy intersection from the coffee shop :) As we approached the box office two ticket scalpers approached us with two tickets. They were in the VIP section of the theater and were 200 kuai a piece. Bill and I turned them down because we were unsure whether they were real tickets. However, when we entered the box office they only had tickets for the second level and those were 300 kuai each. As we were discussing our options, one of the ticket scalpers came into the box office with his tickets and offered them to us again. We asked him if we needed a VIP pass to sit in those seats and he thought we were asking him to lower the price. He kept lowering the price and we kept asking if we needed a pass. He made a final offer of 175 a piece but never addressed our question about the VIP pass :) Bill and I threw caution to the wind and purchased the scalped tickets because it felt more adventurous. It turns out they were real tickets and great seats. The first performance was a cello piece that was mediocre. The cellist was extremely talented but the composition itself was very weak. The second performance on the other hand was quite simply INCREDIBLE. It was Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.1 aka "Titan." I've never heard anything like it.

When we left the concert we saw a jumbotron on a building and noticed that many people were sitting on the grass watching it. With a better view, we saw that it was replaying the opening ceremony of the Olympics. There is a channel here that will replay the whole thing. We watched a bit of the ceremony and then made our way to The Bund where the nightlife is. We met Tricia from Denison and Jessica from Oklahoma State at a bar called De La Coast. I will omit some of those detials ;) but we hung there until around 2:30 and then headed home. I don't think I've ever been so happy to get off my feet and fall into bed!

Day 3

This morning we were left to fend for ourselves for breakfast so Selina and I went down the street to a convenience store and got pastries. Walking back to the apartments we stopped by a tea kind of place and got bubble tea which was really good. It has these small little balls in coffee milk which gives it a tea flavor and then you chew the tea thingies as you drink the coffee milk. It was really interesting. We then returned to the apartments and couldn't find an outside table so we sat down on the curb to eat our makeshift breakfast. We plan to go to a different place for the next few mornings to see if we find one place we like.

After breakfast we began our tour of Fudan University. It is HUGE HUGE HUGE. I mean, it puts UT to shame big time. They have very unique gardens dispersed throughout the campus although on our route we only came across one. It was very peaceful and I look forward to reading there in the future! We ate lunch in a 5 story cafeteria and the food was pretty decent. Again, the lazy susan was loaded down with many dishes. I ate this weird black thing that was very squishy and grows on trees. I was pleasantly surprised that I liked it :)

After lunch we went to take the placement exam. They informed us that in our Chinese language classes we are to only speak Chinese and will lose points if we speak in English. This is going to be a very intense semester. I can understand individual words in a sentence but tying the whole thing together is difficult because they speak so fast. My Chinese has a lot of room for improvement so I'm glad I came here! After the placement exam, which was really really hard, I walked outside to find it pouring down rain. Being the major fan of rain that I am I elected to make the 15 minute walk from the building where we have classes back to the apartments instead of calling a cab. No one else finished the exam with me so I walked by myself. I have to say, it was very cool. Walking in the rain, I had my golf rain jacket and that's it, my head was soaked but I found myself thoroughly delighted. I crossed streets where there weren't crosswalks and I said hello to a group of Chinese gentlemen in a restaurant who looked very amused to see a blonde girl walking around in the rain in Shanghai without an umbrella. They said hello in english through the glass and I smiled back and said "Ni Hao" and they laughed, the rain walk is the first independent journey I have made and I absolutely loved it! I consider this trip to be a major success because I didn't get honked at or almost run over at all :)

We went to dinner at a place really close to our apartments and I ate the best fried rice with egg that I've ever tasted for less than $1. I will definitely be going there again. After dinner we went to a acrobat show in downtown Shanghai. All I have to say about downtown is WOW. I have never seen so many residential buildings jammed into one place. The scale of this city is overwhelming. The acrobat show was good but some of the sections of the show were very bizarre. For example, a random laser light show that began to hurt my eyes that was set to a background of heavy techno. On the way back our bus nicked the side view mirror of a car on the high way but they don't have shoulders so we just stopped in the middle of a busy high way in not one, but two lanes. Traffic was piling up behind us and cars were honking like crazy. It was a very interesting way to end the evening.

Tomorrow our Chinese roommate moves in and we have a scavenger hunt in downtown Shanghai. I think we will stay down there until tomorrow night to see what kind of nightlife we can find :) 

First Post

Hello Family & Friends!!!!

THIS IS INCREDIBLE!!! Sorry, I just had to get that out.

 I left Austin at 3:30 on Tuesday morning and got here at 1:30 Wednesday afternoon. I'm not sure what day it was in the US, I keep getting confused :) The food on the plane was pretty good. They served "Chinese Noodles" which was basically Ramen but they tried to make it look authentic but it was most definitely just like Ramen. So, after 14 hours no a plane, which was daylight the whole time, I have been in China for about a day.

Our apartments are AWESOME. They look like they're furnished by IKEA and there is tons of space. There are three rooms with two bathrooms and one of the rooms has it's own bathroom and guess who got that one. That's right, yours truly :) We haven't met out local roommate yet but my fellow Alliance roommate is also from Austin and went to St. Stephen's. Small world, huh? We were both talking yesterday about how we're already pining for Mexican food. But she's very sarcastic and laid back so basically the complete opposite of me so I don't think it will work out ;) Our room is on the 14th floor with a killer view. We call it the penthouse.

Last night we went to dinner with Alliance students and ate food. It has not been the land of small portions so far. The tables have lazy susans in the middle and they just kept bringing more and more and more food out. They have done that for every meal so far except breakfast this morning. We talked to several local Fudan students and they were all very nice. We talked about Dark Night, American TV shows, and Shanghai nightlife. One girl had just taken a class on English Lit and she asked tons of questions about plays and poetry. I know I'm a nerd, but I got really excited to talk to her about it :)

This is for all the Gtown people, guess where we went after we ate? You guessed it, Wal-mart!!! It's about a mile walk from campus so we took off around 8 at night and went walking the streets of Shanghai. Even at night it's extremely active. This Wal-mart is the most amazing Wal-mart I have ever seen. It's four stories with escalator ramps and just about everything you could imagine. We are going back today to get more stuff so I will add more pictures. I know pictures of Wal-mart isn't exatly what you want to see but seriously, I've never seen anything like it!

We have quickly learned that traffic most definitely does not yield to pedestrians as we all almost got run over several times last night. Even the bikers seemed like they were in a mission to mow us down. I have also not embarrassed myself with my mediocre chopstick skills yet. So far all my food has stayed on my plate and not on my lap :)

We are going shopping this afternoon at a 9 story mall, residing across the street from Wal-mart, and to get cell phones so we can call each other in Shanghai. I will post again before classes start on Monday to let you know who the rest of orientation goes. I will post pictures later when I have time.

Love you guys!!!!