The Weekend, and Thoughts

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First, a brief re-cap of the weekend: Thursday was my roommate Jeanette's birthday (yay! I think it's possible I was more excited about it than she was) and it ended up being a great day all around. For dinner we went to an "authentic" japanese restaurant - it was the kind of place where you have to take your shoes off and sit on the mats, and I came to one conclusion about myself eating sushi while in China, and that is, I probably won't be doing it again. My choices at any sushi restaurant are pretty limited anyway, but they don't seem to have avocado here, so I'm basically limited to cucumber rolls. That and not being able to read either the Chinese or the Japanese on the menu is just not a good situation. So, I've resolved to wait until I go back home to resume my interest in Sushi. After dinner (which was just us girls), we were waiting for everyone else to meet us at Windows, and because it was a group of 8 girls, we were enticed into a bar on Maoming Lu called "Judy's" advertising the fact that it was Ladies Night. Ladies Night at Judy's ended up being hysterical. We had to argue for our free drinks and my wine was so bad I tried to send it back, and it felt like they changed the music just for us when we walked in - it was the funniest mix of oldies (Ale, they actually played "Liz Anne!" - it exists! even in China!), "great balls of fire," "la bamba" and other classics like "who let the dogs out" and "blue." And there was nothing else we could do but let go completely and dance at our table and it was just too funny. From there we went to Windows which always does it for us and then we went to this club called Bon Bon which we usually stay away from because it's Techno, but apparently that night was one of their first hip hop nights and the dj was amazing (even played MIA & Diplo & Reggaeton!) and it was a pretty swanky place and the bathrooms had a ginormous rose petal sink and we all hadn't been out for over a week and so we were dancing like crazy and we were all sweating so much, and then someone had the brilliant idea of ordering fruit plates and it was an awesome night. On Friday and Saturday, Kelly and I did what I'd like to refer to as our own personal walking tour of Shanghai where we basically walked all over the entire city (our motto being we're new yorkers, we can do it) and it was a great feeling to walk most of our subway line to actually see everything that's out on the streets instead of riding below it. Lots of great neighborhoods to come back to, we saw a movie being filmed on a random side street, I spent all of the money I had with me before we even got to our intended destination (the Yu Yuan Gardens Market/Bazaar), and we had Western food for our meals both days (may have been the highlight of the weekend? Apparently Western gourmet-ish restaurants here - or all 2 that I know of - like to use pumpkin as an ingredient in all of the sandwiches...random). I think we may have overdone it by the time we got to the YuYuan Market though, we had walked for over 2 hours to get there, and I guess the last time we went it hadn't been on a weekend because the place was absolutely packed and it was one of those occasions when you really feel the size of China's enormous population. It was really difficult to walk anywhere, so I bought some postcards, and then we left. Another thing I forgot to mention was that on Friday afternoon, my Chinese class met in Zhongshan Park because it was our teacher's birthday, and it was so cute, we celebrated her birthday and Jeanette's by going on bumper boats and other rides and then we sat around on the grass and ate cake. And I had just picked up my camera (thank god) so I took lots of pics, a lot of the old people walking around who I find to be excellent subjects and is almost certainly because of my dad's influence.

So that's the summary of the weekend, and is also a good transition to what I really want to write about:
I feel like, and I'm not sure how to really put this, but I feel like being here and being this far away from home is really helping to give me a good sense of who I am. And I've noticed this in more than one way.
Tonight, for instance, I feel like I learned a little bit more about my family, and that's because of a sort of strange situation that turned out to be pretty cool. A guy who works with my dad was in Shanghai on business, and my dad had him contact me because he brought my mom's camera for me from the states.
He was really nice and invited me to dinner with him and the pretty large group of other foreign businessmen (and women) he was with, and I decided to go - it was in a different part of town and the restaurant was on a boat, or it was at least floating, and it was cool to still be in Shanghai and yet have surrounded myself with a completely different crowd of people. At dinner I was sitting next to Peter, who works with my dad at American Century in New York now, and on the other side of me was a young-ish British guy who worked with my dad at Shroeders in London, and there we were in China and I felt like I had some insight into my dad's life, and my life experiences so far as well, and I see now that it is going to be very important to me to have a job that allows me to be in this kind of expat and international circle.
Another aspect about dinner that was really enjoyable was the fact that I have now been in Shanghai over a month, and all of these people were just dropping in for a day or two, and so I was automatically the knowledgeable one, and I could give them all of these insights about the city and about being a foreigner living in China (for the time being), and I could tell that I am really starting to "own" Shanghai, in the way that I am beginning to feel more and more comfortable in this city. And it was really nice to be able to share the same feeling of shock about the pollution here and not being able to see the sun very much and be reminded of the immediate feelings of culture shock I had when I first arrived. They also asked me if I missed home, and I kind of automatically responded, "No" because I can't really say that I do. I'm still finding it all so exciting, and as for my parents, I feel almost as if I talk to them more now that I'm here than I used to while I was at school in Houston (we love the skype thing) because there's just so much to talk about, and they had asked me if I wanted them to send me anything from home along with my camera, and I told them no because I don't really feel like there's anything I can't get here that I can get at home that I absolutely need. It was really exciting to open the camera case and find a stash of Pria bars though! My parents know me so well!
Wow this is getting to be a long entry again, but the other two ways I feel like I'm getting to know myself more are related to my feelings about being Jewish and being a vegetarian.
I've been wanting to write this part about being a Jew here for a long time. I remember being so surprised to see the list of people's names on my program, and that while I thought that it was entirely possible I'd be the only Jew going to China, as it turns out, maybe half of the people on this program have Jewish last names. It's really so weird to me that I feel like I am surrounded by more Jews on this program in China than I am going to school in Texas. But I've realized something that I think I already knew about being Jewish and it's something that I feel the most whenever I'm in a completely foreign place, completely out of my element and away from everything familiar, and that is that being a Jew, there will always be other Jews in this unknown place whom you may not know, but you know you can rely on. There's a chabad house here which I haven't been to yet but I'm glad to know its here, and it's where we're going to have Passover, which is kind of an exciting thing - instead of next year in Jerusalem, for me it was next year in Shanghai. And the fact that three kids on this trip are Kosher gives me company in having to eat vegetarian here, which is always an effort, and otherwise would be surprisingly lonely (more on that in a sec). I really felt this thing, that being Jewish makes me a part of this group of people and because of the Jewish ethics, gives me a responsibility towards them no matter how little I know them, when last week one of the kids on my program's parents were visiting. He is pretty religious, and his grandmother had just died, and so his parents still came, but had been hesitant about it because they wanted to have a Minyan for her every night (I learned something new - I'd never been to a Minyan before and also didn't know that you needed 10 people for it to happen). So all of the nights they were here, myself and the other jewish kids on the trip all went to Ben's apartment for about 15 minutes every night to participate in this minyan, and on the last night they ordered a huge meal of falafel and hummus etc, and I was actually kind of grateful for them for being here and bringing us all together like this, and I felt this big responsibility (in a good way) of needing to be there for them. The minyan thing also sparked a conversation among my roommates at our common room table - I'm full Jewish and they are both half-Jewish (I think) and we were explaining to one of the non-Jews on our trip this feeling of what it meant to be Jewish and away from home and it was like there was an immediate community for you, and it was cool that at that moment I felt like I had so much in common with my roommates. In Texas, I could explain that feeling to my friends but I'd be the only one, and here they both knew and understood too, and could help me explain it to another person, and I know these things have nothing to do with one another, but I felt like all of us being Jewish to some degree, and also being together in learning Mandarin and having this sort of obscure interest in China was a really nice thing. Did I mention I love being here?
The one other thing that I've (quickly) been thinking about is that while I made the decision to become a vegetarian when I was five, this is the first time that I've really been thinking about how lonely it can be. On our group trips or whenever CIEE takes us all to a meal, I have to leave my friends and sit separately with the 3 people who are kosher and our program director at our self-created "vegetarian" section, and it feels weirdly exclusive. And after the sushi restaurant, I kind of felt like the next time my friends were going for sushi, it would just be easier for me not to go. And even tonight when I was invited to this dinner and I didn't know the people, I spent some time thinking about how it was going to be difficult to have to explain I was a vegetarian and make sure I had something to eat, etc. etc. etc. This is something I can see I definitely take for granted in America, and is one of the reasons that when it comes down to it, I don't know that I could live abroad in a place like Shanghai for too long a period of time. It kind of makes me sad in a way that my eating habits can actually dictate my life and my life choices to a degree.

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