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!