Zhoushan

On Friday right after work (ok, I left work 30 minutes early), I took a taxi to Shanghai Maritime University, where I met Kevin. Using Kevin’s car, we drove around Shanghai picking up the rest of the group. At about 8:30, all 6 of us had piled into Kevin’s 5-seat Kia Sportage and were ready to go. I lucked out and got to sit in the front the whole trip. I kept offering to switch, but I think no one really wanted to share the backseat with the biggest person on the trip – as they told me, “with Americans you are skinny, but with Chinese people you’re fat” (this was also the explanation throughout the trip for why I didn’t think it was as cold as they did).

On the way, we watched the show Friends with Chinese subtitles. I’m not exactly sure why they like the show because it seems like most of the humor comes from silly puns that probably don’t translate well, but Kevin had several DVDs worth of episodes in his car. The girls said they were also fans of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, while the guys preferred Prison Break.

We arrived at our hotel in Zhoushan at 3:30am and checked into our rooms (two 3-bed rooms for a total of 160 Yuan, a little over 22 dollars), which were Spartan but comfortable. On Saturday morning, we snuck under a fence into a nearby beach and walked around – it was pretty cold so none of us swam. We stumbled upon an intense-looking sand sculpture contest. Here’s a picture of one of the more impressive ones:














There were also bigger sand sculptures, including some that you could walk on.

For lunch we ate 海鲜面, seafood noodles. These were essentially an assortment of shelled things thrown into a boiling pot of water (shells and all) with noodles, seasoning, and vegetables added. Here’s a picture:














For 15 Yuan, about 2 dollars, the noodles were pretty good after I got over their initial strangeness. We visited a Buddhist temple in the afternoon. It was pretty, but I think I’ve seen more than enough Buddhist temples while I’ve been in China. Dinner was much stranger than lunch – there were things I ate that I didn’t even know existed in the ocean.

On Sunday, we took a pretty long ferry north towards Shanghai. I taught them how to play Egyptian Rat Screw because I was tired of losing at their card games; however, in the very first game we played, I was the first to lose. Next time I’m bringing a Scrabble board; that’ll get ‘em (joking).

I got home exhausted at about 8:30, picked up my dry-cleaning, ate dinner, and crashed.

Packing

I'm currently getting ready to go on a weekend trip to an island in China with some friends. I don't actually know what the island is called or what we'll be doing there, but I'm excited about exploring some more of China. Because I seem to get sick in China whenever it is the most inconvenient to do so, I'm bringing plenty of Immodium and toilet paper. I leave right after work tomorrow, returning sometime Sunday afternoon.

A Good Weekend

On Saturday, I slept in, went on an outing to buy deodorant, which is annoyingly difficult to find in China, and played basketball at Shanghai Maritime University, 上海海事大学, with a coworker and his friend. The courts were just regular gray concrete, and they were packed; nonetheless, it was a lot of fun to be on a college campus again. My coworker, who was an undergrad at Shanghai Maritime University, said that the 4 floor teaching building was once the tallest building in Pudong. The small campus area is now dwarfed by 50+ floor skyscrapers. I read somewhere that in 2015, 50% of the world's buildings constructed since 2000 will be in China. Looking around the neighborhood where I live, this is not hard to believe.

While we played basketball, my friends' girlfriends made dinner (somehow, I think we got the better end of that deal). Among other dishes, dinner included chicken feet, a first for me. They mostly 'tasted like chicken', except with a definite tendon and ligament texture to them (which I guess makes sense). I learned by watching the others at the table that the way to eat chicken feet is just to bite off the fingers and spit out what you can't chew, which is surprisingly little if you're good. My main complaint was that the feet were a lot of work for very little meat.

On Sunday after another basketball game with some other people from my office, I met with the Fall FSP kids for dinner. It was fun to talk to them and reminisce a little about what it was like to have been in China for only about 4 or 5 weeks, taking classes and exploring Beijing. I think I might try to visit them in Beijing sometime this fall, but we'll have to see - I'm also planning trips to Hangzhou and Suzhou with my neighbors and coworkers.

I'm getting ready to start some intense exploration of Shanghai. It's very easy to just want to go home and read or nap after work, but I think I will regret doing that too often once I'm back in the States.

这几天

On Sunday night, I went to a party with one of my dad's former students. The party was another kid named Joe's birthday party. Understandably, I had some difficulty answering the "How do you know Joe?" question:

"Well, I AM Joe, but - uh - my dad's former student, whom I just met tonight, somehow met Joe... - sighs - I don't know Joe."

The party was actually pretty fun. It was definitely the most multicultural event I think I've ever been to: I met people from France, Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Japan, US, and - of course - China.















On Tuesday, I went to Zhouzhuang with my neighbors and their friends for the day. Because this week everyone in China is off of work for the National Holidays, Zhouzhuang was ridiculously packed. Chinese traveling is something I'm not sure I will ever get used to: you're led by a fast-talking tour-guide with a megaphone through hot, crowded tourist attractions, which mostly exist as places for humorous photo-ops (i.e. sit down at this ancient wealthy Chinese person's desk for a picture).

We all had our fortunes read by monks at a temple we visited. This was very bizarre. You "donate" some amount of money to enter a big room lined with people waiting to talk to one of the 7 or 8 monks reading fortunes. They give you one of about 12 possible pieces of paper with Chinese writing that the monk reads to tell you your fortune (mine had the character 上 on it - my neighbor tells me this is good). If you buy a gift for a monk you can go to the front of the line in front of all those who merely "donated". When the monk finally got to me, a lowly donor, he told me in hushed, fast Chinese that I had a stubborn personality and needed to open up to my friends more. I thanked him and wondered how many of the hundreds around me would get the same advice.