first day

my first day was pretty boring. i spent most of the day going through menial orientation things. the worst part is that the vast majority of the orientation material didn't apply to me, an unpaid intern from america. i was orientated with 3 other people, all shanghainese. two are secretaries and one is an IT support guy. because we were all given the same orientation spiel, a particular section rarely applied to more than two of us.

i'm slowly discovering that the area i'm working in is incredibly expensive. i'm starting to miss all the cheap meals i had in beijing; here, i'm almost paying western prices for my meals. i've been trying to cook a little, but the little gas stove i have is irritable and often goes on strikes.

i'm starting to give up any hopes i had of understanding shanghainese. it really is radically different from pu tong hua (normal mandarin). luckily, most people i've met have been willing and able to speak mandarin with me.

random: a lot of my coworkers have things that look like little desktop humidifiers. they're just these little machines that produce steam. i'm guessing they have some kind of medical purpose, though i can't quite figure out what that'd be.

到了

two nights ago i took an overnight train from beijing to shanghai. i arrived in shanghai at about 7am. after a delicious *rolls eyes* KFC breakfast i took a taxi to the building where my office is. The building (Jin Mao Tower) is one of Shanghai's tallest and the taxi driver knew it by name, though it's at least 20 minutes from the train station.

when i got to the office, the office driver, a secretary and the office maid (they call her wei ayi, or aunt wei) took me to my apartment. The secretary and wei ayi nagged the landlord to fix or clean various aspects of the apartment. while the landlord fixed up the apartment, the two took me to buy various 日用品 (necessities) at a grocery store nearby. The outing was very surreal: two Chinese women leading me through a grocery store, speaking Shanghainese to eachother and Mandarin to me, asking me whether i need dishwashing detergent, milk, chopsticks, etc. Strangely, it reminded me a little of the Wal-Mart visit I did with my parents right before college.

my apartment is on the 19th floor of a 35 floor building and the office building is something like 88 floors tall. when i walk on the street i still find myself spending a lot of time with my neck craned staring up at all the buildings. my apartment is pretty standard: 1 bathroom, 1 bedroom, kitchen, living room, and a closed in balcony/office. From the balcony window I can see the river that splits Shanghai in two, lots of buildings taller than my own, and 6 different tennis courts. i'm not sure why we need so many tennis courts sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.

i start work on monday. i'll post pictures of my apartment and office building sometime soon.

so here's the scoop:

after months of uncertainty, it looks like i'll be working in shanghai until mid-december. i'll be an intern at the law firm baker and mckenzie. i'm still kind of finishing up the details, but so far, that's the plan. i'm sorry to keep you guys out of the loop.

Cell Phone Issues

today i attempted to buy recharge minutes for my cell phone (in china, most plans are prepaid). unfortunately, i don't yet know much cell phone policy vocabulary, so when my phone failed to work after recharging i had about an hour long confusing discussion with the salesman. from my understanding, a long distance conversation i had with my dad on his birthday had actually racked up a debt (i didn't know this was possible), which i either had to pay off or avoid by switching numbers. he convinced me to buy a new number from him because it would be cheaper than settling the debt - i don't yet know if he did me a favor or duped me. he works at the university's store, so i'm going to hope for the the former; i get tricked enough as it is.

Tiananmen Square

This is actually an old one, but it's from a really fun night we spent at Tiananmen Square. We got there just before sunset and saw the lowering of the flag with a huge mass of other people. We walked around and got to see all of the standard Beijing sites. As usual, us foreigners were quite the spectacle - at one point, a pair of Chinese twins asked to take a picture with me and a friend of mine (these strange requests have actually been repeated a few times in various places). I can't imagine how weird we must look that people ask to take pictures with us; or, more commonly, furtively take pictures when we don't appear to be looking. A friend of mine named Lei Zhen (Thunder Earthquake... a.k.a. John) has it worse - several Chinese children upon seeing him have run away or began crying. He doesn't seem too bothered by it, saying seeing us must be like how an American child would feel seeing an alien right out of Independence Day.

Datong

This picture is taken from the courtyard of a Buddhist Monastery in the middle of Datong. I think at the time, the Backstreet boys were playing at an outdoor fashion show nearby (we actually convinced them to let one of our friends walk down the aisle). you run into a lot of similar bizarre contrasts - especially in the ways that the west and east combine.

a chinese sunday afternoon

for various reasons, studying in beijing means being in a state of perpetual exhaustion. i think my closest friends on the trip and i all went to sleep at about 9p last night and slept 13-14 hours each. this afternoon we went to "Panjiayuan" which is an enormous flea market filled Mao-memorabilia and dubiously "ancient" pieces of art. most of us didn't buy much - i think we mainly wanted to hone our haggling skills and people watch a little. we took a rather long taxi back (maybe about the length of a 40-50 dollar taxi in America) and i think i had my best Chinese speaking experience. The cab driver and I talked about the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the respective GDP's and populations of America and China, the difficulties of studying English and Chinese, and even American politics (the driver was particularly fond of Hillary Clinton or, in Chinese, He-La-Li.