Blogs from Xujiahui, Shanghai, China, Asia - page 2

Apart from one student in the program waking up in a random apartment in Pudong with two French girls who were just glad he was alive and not in a coma and who helped him pay for a taxi back to SJTU and him barely making it to the tour on time, that morning was uneventful - though I did go for a another run and cut my leg on something. First stop on the tour Saturday morning was at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre. We had a short tour of the place, seeing the history of the Bund, how Shanghai has quickly developed and grown, how the architecture in several districts has been changed or preserved, and plans for the future. I scanned around a little bit, but much of it was in Chinese, ... read more

This past week has been very busy with class and orientations. I also had my first Chinese cooking class where we made a very spicy beef tofu dish. It was delicious but the first cooking class was crowded and the kitchen was small so we cooked in groups of 4. Next week I should have a better chance for some hands on cooking since a large number of people decided to drop out of the cooking class. On Thursday one of the SJTU volunteers called Scott in our group and offered to take us to the Xuijiahui park, the public park for the area. When she invited us she asked, “You want to go the party and get a snake.” She meant go to the park and get a snack. Shanghai has many well maintained parks ... read more

I woke up late today for the first time, couldn't go to sleep until about 3am, but Chinese 1002 was canceled so I found enough time to eat and get stuff done after Diff Eq. The only eventful thing to speak for today is the Martial Arts class. We met the instructor and gathered in the lobby of one of the older classroom buildings. Yu Wang acted as the translator for the master, he said that we were learning the Shaolin form of Wushu that is supposedly more used for performances than fighting (vs. Kong Fu) according to two GT LBAT students who had learned some previously (Dan and Austin). We learned 3 types of hand forms - the fist (which has 6 faces), straight (which has like 3 ways to use), and the hook ... read more

It wasn't hard to find my first class, Differential Equations at 8am, just missed it by one floor, ha. Professor Geronimo, one of the four horseman of the mathematical classes at Tech, is teaching it but he doesn't seem that impossible. Half of the SSP group is in the class. I could barely recall any Calculus, but I followed him decently, though 2 hours is a bit long. Afterwards, a large group of us hit up a bakery near a McDonald's. I bought a strawberry cream bun, some cheese bread, and a "meat pie". The bun was delicious, the meat pie just tasted like an apple pie, and the cheese bread was quite sweet - never had anything like it before. It appears that they just glazed a semi-sweet sugar coat over the entire bread. ... read more

So the first night (5/15) we arrived, Ted, Sean, Ethan, one other SSP'er (Shanghai Study Abroad student, forgot his name), and I decided just to walk down a few streets to check out a few restaurants and try to get a general layout of the streets. It was about 11pm when we left and there were still a substantial number of locals walking around, a few mopeders/bikers, and still several cars when we came back around 1:30am. We quickly learned how to cross the street in non-life endangering manner. We walked past, what I know now as, Metro Station and saw plenty of restaurants and shops down Guangyuan and Huahai Roads. There are an unbelievable number of different restaurants, small shops, and street vendors...it's insane. I didn't experience much jetlag, considering it is exactly a ... read more