Shanghai

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Shanghai:
My third trans-pacific flight (first 2 Australia) wasn’t any easier than the previous two, 15 hours of thumb twiddling and failed attempts to sleep at an airline deemed generous 70-degree incline. Exhausted, grimy, and uninspired we finally touch down in Shanghai and hop in a hotel shuttle for a one hour ride to the hotel for our 5 day "orientation" (I use that word loosely). Shanghai dwarfs any other major world city I had been to previously. It seemed like ¾ of the shuttle ride was through downtown. I don’t know where it ranks in terms of population density but it has to be near the top of the list, high-rise apartments as far as the eye can see. It was mostly cloudy, come to find out is just the everyday norm for most Chinese cities. A far cry from the West Virginia fresh air I am used to, excluding Nitro air of course.

We had orientation classes every morning, mostly covering basic things like visa status, common sense do’s and don’ts in a foreign country, and of course the black list of classroom topics: Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Urumqi, everything as expected. Afternoons and evenings were seeing the major sites of Shanghai; the Bund, Nanjing Road, French Concession, and any sketchy looking back alley street that we thought merited exploring. In the 1920s and 30s Shanghai was a major cultural city dubbed the Paris of the east and some of the architecture and nuances still reflect it. But its also just as modern as any city in the west, not the ancient looking pagodas many people still think China is made up of. Shanghai is so modern and westernized my inability to speak Chinese remained a dormant issue. World class subway system and many western bars and restaurants kept any culture shock to a minimum. The five days came to end and ended with a pretty epic night of karaoke and exploiting the $.80 cost of 24 oz. beers. Next stop Zhengzhou (Jung-Jo) my home for the next year. A city I had never heard of that’s larger than Chicago.<!--EndFragment-->

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