2nd day's impression

Well here I am, i have arrived in china, and its my second day. I just got my internet working about an hour ago, otherwise i would have made this post yesterday.

Day 1:
For those of you who havn't been this far from home before, let me recount the past 2-3 days for you. The night before I left, my anxiety got the best of me, and i only managed 1 hour of sleep before my 4AM wakeup call to leave for the plane to chicago. over the next 20 or so hours, i didn't sleep more than 15 minutes. and considering my second flight was a 15 hour flight straight to shanghai I find that fairly impressive and disturbing. The flights themselves were great.



Before the second flight, I met one of the kids from Union college who is in the same program as me, and it turned out we were in the same flight to shanghai. Once we arrived (around 2:20 PM), we pooled what little verbal chinese skills (none) we had together to get through the 3 stages of customs. Dispite being in a foreign country for the first time and not having spoken the language enough in the last 2 months to remember anything worth while it went fairly smoothly. Pudong aiport is as massive as i have ever seen or imagined. You could have fit 2 professional soccer fields with stadium seating in the area that housed the baggage claim. Once the we had passed through the last gate of customs we began looking for our teacher. We were tired(he hadn't slept any more than i had) we were hungry and carrying close to 100lbs of luggage wasn't helping. Xie laoshi (teacher Xie) had sent us an email saying that she would be holding a white sign with our names on it at the exit, seems simple enough right? well apparently 5000 other people had the same idea. Xie turned out to be the last person in that line.

The Three of us piled into a van with sqeaky brakes and an A/C unit that was on its last legs. Oh yeah, and there were no seatbelts. neither Xie nor the driver seemed too concerned about this, even when the traffic widly ignored the dividing lines and made some of the riskiest driving moves i've ever seen. Call it culture shock if you like, i prefer the phrase "heart attack".

The drive was about an hour to Fudan University, the school I will study under for my duration here. Fudan is in the Top 5 Universities in china, the requirements for getting in are fairly insane. Lucky me. We arrived, checked in and went to our rooms. I was impressed. Everyone from Union was going to have a single. Each room was air conditioned, contained a tv with cable, and had its own private bathroom, that being said, lets talk about the drawbacks. Imagine going to a hotel, and walking into a room with anything beyond furniture in it. that means no sheets, pillows, toilette paper, towels or anything. However, i was delirious with fatigue, and didn't really notice much of this till the next morning. Professor Xie had her follow us to a classroom building where we pulled bikes for our use out of a storage room. From there we took the bikes to be serviced (they hadn't been used since last fall) and then off to dinner.

I had flown close to 8000 miles, leaving my half of the globe and the culture that goes with it, and can you guess what my first meal was? Nope you're wrong, it was baked ziti, tomato soup and some sort of custard dessert. The restaurant we went to was known for its western style food(and it was really good). I guess our professor didn't want to push us too far incase we were picky.

Once dinner was finished, we needed to go shopping so we would survive the night in our rooms. (sheets, comforter etc.) We used our new bikes to go to a chinese mall. it had a full size grocery store on the first floor and the department store on the second floor. Very efficient. I also picked out a tube of crest toothpaste which i swear is green tea flavored and a bottle of shampoo which turned out to be conditioner. I suppose this happens less once you know the language, but theres no real way to be sure. We came back to fudan and passed out immediately. It had been close to 48 hours since the last time i had had more than a 1 hour nap.

Day 2:

The day started at 10 when we met Xie laoshi in the lobby of our dorm. We set out to take the rest of the bikes out of storage, meet John, another Union student who had arrived after I had fallen asleep the night before, and get some food.

Today we dove right into the chinese food, and went to a hunan restaurant. Hunan is either an area or city in China notable for place of birth for the founder of the peoples republic of china, and spicy food. this lunch was not lacking in the latter, and it was amazing. we ordered up a feast, 90% of which was food i had never layed eyes on before. We ordered 4 entrees and 4 appetizers, and the bill came to roughly $20 American after conversion...For all 4 of us. I love China.



When i woke up this morning, I started looking around my room for things I was going to need during the rest of my stay here, and made a list that was as long as a fully stretched hand. some of the highlights were "trash can" " toilete paper", etc. So after lunch, we went shopping again. We bought 2 new bikes, so that everyone in the program would have one to use at their disposal. I claimed one of the new ones through seniority. Back of the line youngin'. a bike costs about 15 dollars american. sure the brakes are iffy at best and it only has one gear. But hey, you get what you pay for.

Pictured here is proof that i have now eaten a chicken's foot.

2 more of the union guys should be arriving tonight and we'll be going out for dinner with them, both of them are good guys i like alot, so im excited to see them. Thats all for now, I'll fill in more as i go.

Eat a cheese burger with extra pickles for me