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Chinese Dress
This was the authentic Chinese dress that the students had me model So this past week was a very exciting week! Even more exciting than my first week as far as cool things. Last week was a little rough in getting used to things, but now that I am feeling much more comfortable in Shanghai, I am getting to do a lot more cool stuff and I don't feel so completely incapable.
I have a friend named Nichole who lives here in Shanghai from my stake back home. We graduated from high school the same year, and we weren't in a really large stake, and so it is really amazing that we both ended up in Shanghai at the same time. Anyway, she has been really helpful these past few weeks, and it has been a great experience hanging out with her because she has really become a regular Shanghainese. So, she told me about how they have an ultimate frisbee group on Monday nights in Shanghai and it is a bunch of people from the USA that get together and play. She invited me to come, and so I thought it'd be a really neat thing to go to. It was a lot of fun! It was great to meet other
Hostel View
This was the canal and road that was right outside our hostel. It was a really great hostel Americans who were living in Shanghai and they were really nice and let me play with them even though I'm not very good. It ended up being more of just an exercise than me contributing to their team, but it was still a lot of fun running around and acting like I knew what I was doing.
The more exciting thing that happened that night was that Nichole picked me up to go to the frisbee place on her moped. I don't know if I talked about how crazy the taxi drivers are around here, but they are pretty crazy. It is hard to not feel a little bit of a rush when a taxi driver pulls into oncoming traffic to pass a slow person in front of them. But, the mopeds and the bikes drive even worse. Red lights just mean slow down and look both ways. Four feet of space between the car in front of you and the curb is plenty of space to pass the car in front of you. If a pedestrian is in your way, honk LOUD and they will move out of the way, or you have the right to sideswipe them.
North Temple Pagoda
We got to go to the top of this pagoda. It was a really great view of Suzhou These are the driving rules for mopeds that I learned in Shanghai on my trip to playing frisbee. It was one of those experiences where you have no control over the situation, and so you just enjoy it. It was a lot of fun, and it was definitely an adventure.
The rest of the week was good. It went by pretty quickly. My Tuesday Chinese cooking class was great, and the food we made had lots of oil (as always), pineapple, green peppers, garlic, and plenty of soy sauce. My Wednesday Tai Chi class was a lot of fun, too, and I got a great thigh workout as always. On Thursday night some of the students at the host university threw us a party and Chinese people can really throw parties! They had some singing and dancing acts. The students could really dance! I think all of the guys knew how to breakdance and all of the girls could dance like Beyonce. It was really intense. And they were electrical engineering students. This is a little different than Tech. They also picked a few girls to dress up in Chinese traditional attire, and so I got to dress up
MeinHang Campus
Me and the Lion at the other Jiao Tong Campus in this great Chinese dress and walk up to the stage. It was really a great party, and I was pretty happy to be able to go and see how the Chinese have fun. 😊
The past two days I spent in a city called Suzhou. It is about 50 miles outside of Shanghai, and it has so many beautiful gardens, and pagodas, and just some really cool things to see. There are no signs in English like in Shanghai. I realized how lucky we are to be in Shanghai because so much of the advertisements and the restaurant menus in Shanghai are in English. Anyway, it was an adventure to be in Suzhou. We went to a garden called the Humble Administrator's Garden, and a place called Tiger Hill, and the North Temple Pagoda and a garden called the Lion's Grove Garden. They were all really cool, and it was great to be in a more rural part of China. They had a lot of gifts for tourists, and we got to barter a lot with the vendors. It is really exciting to get something for a third of the original price, even though the original price is
Bonzai Garden
This was a really cool garden at Tiger Hill still pretty cheap. It is really fun to barter with the people. We also got to stay in a hostel right by a canal that goes through the city. The hostel was an old Suzhou house that was converted, and it was a really gorgeous place. I think I really like hostels. They are so cheap! It was just a really great trip. We ran into a few kinks as it was our first time out of Shanghai and none of us knew Chinese, but we were able to get around OK.
I got to go to church this Sunday, too, which was really nice, and they fed us dinner at 5:00 at the Branch President's house. There was also a visitor who was over all of the temporal affairs of the church in Asia, and he told us all about his various jobs in the church and how he travels all over Asia to do emergency relief. He also told us some good stories about meetings with President Hinckley and President Monson and President Faust. It was a really cool night, and it was great to meet such a down to earth couple. They were really nice and
Climbing the Lion Rocks
This one garden was a big playground - tons of fun took a lot of interest in what each of the young single adults were doing in China and each of our future plans. Nichole and I took a taxi back with the couple, too, and it was great to get to talk to them about their travels again. Now, I am back in my dorm and enjoying my soft-ish bed and writing in my blog! I hope everyone had a great week, and I will talk to you later!
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