June 3

Tried to sleep late, since I technically had nowhere to be until 11:30 am. It was a little hard since the hotel staff kept trying to come in and clean my room. Elizabeth left around 8 am, and I managed to stay in bed til after 10. Missed breakfast, packed up all my stuff, then we did lunch at McDonald’s. A short bus ride and we were at our new hotel, a brand new Crowne Plaza, right next to Fudan University. The rooms are nice, the bathroom even nicer, and there’s an indoor swimming pool. The view isn’t as nice, but it isn’t bad, and we can finally unpack our bags. Laundry is on the agenda as well. Internet is expensive ($13 per 24 hour period…as compared with $4 we had one place, and FREE that we had at others).

A student brought us around and showed us where our class is going to be. But it will be moving to a different place after the first day. We were scheduled to be in a new building, but we’re currently in the same old building as last year, which has really loud construction going on outside. Mandarin is hard enough to learn without jackhammers in the background. The cafeteria is right next door, where we’ll be having most of our lunches (they pay for a card for us). Breakfast is in the hotel, and dinner we’ll be on our own.

We had learned from our student guide that there was a Wal-mart in the area, so naturally we wanted to check it out. We took a taxi that dropped us off by what appeared to be a mall. We found a Burger King and a Dairy Queen, but didn’t see the Wal-mart. I got a chocolate dipped cone for old times sake. We eventually found a big blue and yellow sign (in Chinese) pointing the way to everyday low prices. Wal-mart was an escalator up, and then covered three levels (with slanted conveyor belts in between, so you could take your carts up and down with you). Different specialty areas had their own checkouts, like cosmetics and liquor, so we found ourselves checking out multiple times. They also wouldn’t take our credit cards, they only accepted Union Pay, and we of course have Mastercard and Visa. We did find potato chips, and I picked up face wash, shaving cream and a bottle of wine. We originally thought we’d be able to buy bikes for cheap, but they were a little more expensive than expected, and our student guide had also said they would probably get stolen (since they’d be shiny and new…unlike every other bike here, which looks like it came out of a landfill). With Wal-mart being so massive and non-English speaking, people got aggravated with it pretty quick. I would have liked to wander around a bit more, but then again, I like wandering around Wal-mart in the U.S. We know where it is, so we can go back if need be, but most of us satisfied our immediate needs for toiletries and snacks.

This area of Shanghai isn’t as westernized as downtown was, with less English spoken or on signs. After Wal-mart, our next problem with this arose at dinner, but it sorted itself out nicely, if not amusingly. We had seen a “hot pot” sign earlier, when we were walking through campus, so we returned to that little restaurant. However, the entire menu was in Chinese, and the waitress didn’t speak a word of English. She kept pointing at items on the menu, but we had no idea what she was pointing at. Finally, she came back with some rather worn pieces of paper that had the menu in English (part of it at least). We ordered cokes and beers from this, only to learn that what we thought was one glass of coke, was actually a liter bottle of it. Same with beer. So we ended up with 4 liter cokes, and 6 liter beers (the beer we finished and ordered more of, but we ended up bringing a bottle of coke home, and leaving half of one on the table). Several other tables in the restaurant appeared to be laughing at us, for probably this and the fact that we’re a bunch of apparently freakish looking white people. For actual food we did a better ordering job, realizing we didn’t actually need 10 dishes for 10 people, since we’d all just share. So we found things we recognized (sweet and sour pork, chicken with peanuts, sizzling beef) and pointed at things on other tables that looked appetizing. It was a reasonable success, with nothing being bad, and quite a few items being pretty delicious. Two girls also wanted some soup, so we got two bowls of that…only instead of being single serving, they were huge bowls so we really only needed one (and we could have done without both, we had plenty of food already). So recap: probably 10 liters of beer, 4 liters of coke, about 7 entrees, a bowl of rice, and two bowls of soup, split between 10 people. How much did it set us back? THREE DOLLARS PER PERSON. And considering that we could have done without a bowl of soup, two bottles of coke, and an entrée or two, chances are when we do this again it’ll be like, $2.50 a person. And they don’t tip here, but we’ve been doing it since we’re nice people, and this girl really was ridiculously patient with us. It took several tries to get her to keep the money, she kept trying to give it back as change.

Speaking of food, I’m getting fat (not just from this trip, it’s been happening since I moved to Baton Rouge a year ago) and this hotel has a gym, so Jenny and I have decided to try working out. We did 20 minutes on machines tonight (her on a bike, me on elliptical) and we’ll try to continue and build on that. Since it’s highly unlikely I’ll actually come back to the U.S. speaking Chinese, maybe I can at least come back a smaller pants size.