Saturday: 8/01/2011

Woke up early this morning, as expected… 5:00. Took a shower and was ready around 5:30. My roommate and I just hung around and tried to be productive, organizing the room and getting things set up. I took a panorama of the view from my window, it’s pretty incredible here.

Breakfast was an ordeal! We could not for the life of us understand what the server in the dinning hall was trying to communicate. Eventually someone who must have been a professor used his knowledge of English to explain that we had to pay with our student ID, which we soon realized had no money on it. In the flurry of confusion, he eneded up buying breakfast for all of us… It seemed to come to about 1.5 yuan for each of the six of us.
My roommate Jordyn’s friend Gavin, the GM for International Paper in Shanghai was planned to meet us later in the day to get phones and show us a little bit of the city, so we took the time given in between to aimlessly wander the streets of our immediate location. Lunch was delicious and simple at this chain called “85 Café.” There are many delicous pastries and bread foods all in clear boxes that you pick up in a tray with tongs, eliminating the grunting, nodding, and pointed involved in ordering from a menu hanging above the cashier’s head. Some of them have some ham in/on them, a lot of them have hot dogs involved… It was delicious and we ended up with Jasmine Tea while attempting to order milk tea, but Jasmine Tea is now my new favorite.
We wandered around some of the local malls, which have amazing beautiful decorations throughout, and found a lot of western stores that are similarly priced to in the U.S., but as I learned later, there are hidden “sales” everywhere that you can get if you ask.

I ended up buying three books, two of which were childrens books designed to teach kids english and one is entirely in Chinese, but I like the pictures. I think it totalled to around $12 USD.
Gavin picked us up in his company car (a grey honda van) and we drove to a mall that was about 40 min. by car from campus. There are 4 malls within a ten minute walk from my door, but apparently he likes this one better. Also, if an elevator has too much weight in it, it will skip your floor, so… after about 15 min. of failing to get an elevator from the parking garage we managed to find stairs and an electronics store. I got a cheap, bottom of the line Nokia color cell phone for 259 yuan and paid 55 for a sim card with 50 yuan preloaded on it. Overall, it was a pleasant experience and Gavin was amazing to have. Later, we found it’s much cheaper to get a used phone (Tori’s phone is a little bit nicer than the one I have and in good condition for ¥170.)
After shopping, Gavin took us to this spectacular Shanghainese dinner that ended up being around ¥90 per person that he paid for. Traditionally, you have cold dishes, and then soups, followed by hot dishes with some rice or noodles, and dessert. So, we had some cold chicken and tofu with a salty sauce on top, followed by a traditional bamboo and chicken soup that tasted almost exactly like canned condensed campbells but looked entirely different, and then some noodles along side a shrimp dish and a chicken/tofu/shrimp dish with spicy sauce. The entire time, everything was served with incredibly delicious jasmine tea in a clear kettle and tea leaves with a wire swirly stopper keeping the jasmine from leaving the spout. Eating whole shrimp with chopsticks was quite the struggle, but it’s worth it to do it right. On the shell is this delicious sweet sticky sauce, that you only taste if you correctly hold the shrimp right behind the head, bite the shell and pull the head away. Then, you drop it out of your mouth and hold it just above the tail with the chopsticks and pull the shell/feet off with your teeth and drop that to your plate. Finally, all that is left is the meat attached to the tail, still held in your chopsticks, and that is what you eat.
After Gavin drove us home, I took a quick nap and got ready to go clubbing. There is this fantastic club that plays great techno/house music and there was a chinese beatboxer and african drummers who taught us how to order drinks, but with so many people packed in and so much noise we would struggle ordering drinks without getting ripped off by like ¥300 even if we knew the language, so after about 45 minutes of dancing and half a rum and coke, we left, showed the taxi driver the business card with the intersection our hotel is at, paid ¥33, and I slept.