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Published: November 11th 2012
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Left, Left, Left, Right, Left
Soldiers casually march past us on the subway Californians were not cut out for the cold. And I thought Boston was cold. False. Our professors warned us that
Shanghai would get cold, but I didn't really believe them. I'm not sure why, since this was coming from my professor who got his PhD from Colombia University in New York, and he said east coast winters were nothing compared to Shanghai. Guess I'm in for a real treat! I've started sleeping with my North Face jacket on. My roommate saw me putting it on the other night and started laughing. At least the real winter doesn't start until January and by then I'll be in California hibernating the winter away. Anyways, what makes it so hard to judge the weather every day here is that when you look out of the window in the morning, you cannot tell if it is foggy and cold outside or if it is just a clear day and so you can see all of the smog.
This weekend we realized we only had 5 weekeneds left in China, but one of those weekends we will be in Nanjing and another weekend we will be packing and studying for our finals, which really only
leaves us with 3 weekends to go exploring. So, a group of us went to the Shanghai aquarium bright and early Saturday morning. The aquarium surprised me--it looked like it could have been an aquarium in the states, if you ignored the traditional Chinese opera playing on TV screens around the aquarium and the fake giraffes and other safari animals placed around the marine exhibits. I was very impressed with the aquarium--by no means was it up to Monterey Bay Aquarium standards, but it did have a plethora of animals. It also had a large underwater tunnel that you could walk through and above your head there were huge sharks and sea turtles swimming. If I didn't know the word for "shark" and "sea turtle" before, you can bet I do now--I think every single child and most of the parents were screaming "shark!" or "turtle!" every time they saw one.
The only funny thing about the aquarium was it wasn't entirely an honest aquarium. There was one exhibit with a huge body of water and an alligator laying on a rock. However, upon closer inspection, the alligator was most definitely fake. Another issue we ran into was in
Shark!
A shark casually swims over our heads at the aquarium the "polar" exhibit. They had a couple of penguins which were labelled as Antarctic pengiuns, when they were clearly African penguins (we had a penguin expert in the group). Anyways, apart from small things like that, the aquarium was fun.
After the aquarium, we spent a couple of hours in the largest bookstore in Shanghai. I was trying to find
Star Wars in Mandarin, but they had pretty much every single movie on the planet dubbed in Chinese except for
Star Wars. I did find the book
The Very Hungry Catapillar and other books I read as a child in Chinese, which was kind of cool. I ended up buying a couple of books, and tried to resist the urge to buy the entire 8 stories worth of books and movies.
Today the program outing was to the Shanghai Zoo. The only problem is that zoos here in China are very depressing, because all of the animals are in a very tiny cage with not a lot of room to move around. However, there was free McDonald's to be had for all of the students who went to the zoo. They had the McDonald's delievered to the bus
Pearl Tower
A foggy Pearl Tower in the parking lot of the school, so a couple of us went on the bus, grabbed the McDonald's, and left. Clever? I think so.
While people were at the zoo, I got some work done. Obviously, the Chinese don't celebrate Thanksgiving which is in a couple of weeks, so they thought it might be fun if we had a speech competition on Thanksgiving Day. It was supposed to be voluntary, but my teacher tricked our entire three person class into all of us doing it. So now I'm sitting here trying to figure out what I'm supposed to say for a five minute speech that's supposed to be entitled "China Through My Eyes". I'm thinking about talking about how if I squint a little, I can almost see the turkey that all the Americans will be eating from China.
On a serious note, our time here in China is quickly winding down. Thursday will mark the "only one month left in China" day. There are so many things I still want to do, and so many places I still want to see, that it's going to be a rush to the end to try and cram everything in. I think next weekend I'm going to go to the tea market (yes they have an entire market devoted to tea!) A couple of us are also trying to plan a trip to Xi'an to see the Terracotta warriors and maybe get a glimpse of Mulan (Xi'an was the capital of China back when Mulan saved the day). See, Mom? I'm learning so much.
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