Big Blue

First of all, I would like to give a shout out to my favorite sister in the world - AllyOOOOO. Congrats on two goals last night! Lebo = Pwnd.


G (original and sequel) - you're cool too :-).


Stan and I wanted to take a trip to Walmart to see what the king of low prices could do for us in China. This was the biggest Walmart I've ever seen - it was two floors with the bottom floor completely devoted to food, although it could serve dual purpose as the pet section as well.

They offered just about any animal body part you could ask for, with lots of delicacies like chickens' feet and eel. Next time we go back I'm going to buy a whole dried chicken for a dollar and play a prank on someone (rubber chicken? pssh). Same story with the food here as with everywhere else - it was really cheap, but not much cheaper than the convenience stores around here. It was kind of funny to go to the classy, dressed up imported foods section and see brands items like Barila, Heinz, and lots of no-name US ones. Pop Secret popcorn was $1 a bag (that seems like a lot to me)! I made up for the overpriced popcorn by buying some $.15 jars of jelly. All the other food was Chinese (I was hoping for some Kraft mac & cheese).


Upstairs I stocked up on some essentials like facewash and ping pong paddles. The electronics section was of interest because I could see some fixed prices, without having to worry if a vendor was ripping me off. The accessories were the best deals at Wal Mart, with Monster cables being only about $10 vs $100 at Best Buy (but $20 on ebay). Unfortunately I don't think I'll be shipping anything back home to sell on ebay, unless I can get a good deal on shipping food ;-) Wal Mart didn't even bother to have a movie DVD section (no one would buy them here), and new music CDs were about $5


Overall, I got 5 bags of stuff for about $30. Wal Mart has done a nice job setting up shop in China - they already have 85 stores.

Classes are going pretty well. The professors are on vacation too - so they take it a little easier on us than at home, but I still have a lot of work to do.

The Chinese Stock market dropped 6.5% today because trading commission taxes were tripled. (not sure how objective this source is)

Saturday we're taking a trip to some ancient temples from the 1200s outside the city - so stay tuned, and don't forget to check out my pictures !

the people's square

I'm still here everyone! Sorry I haven't been updated for few days, here's a rundown of what's been happening here.

Friday, Mark and I took the metro down to the People's Square, which is a big beautiful park about 4 stops away from SJTU. I've been surprised by how well kept everything is here - lots of beautiful flora, and clean cut.

Adjacent to the People's Square is the Shanghai Urban Planning Center, which we visited the next day with our whole group. Inside they had a miniature model of the sprawling metropolis, including future buildings. Shanghai is host to the World Exhibition in 2010, so some major projects are underweigh, inluding plans for 10 new subway lines in the next 3 years - that's amazing. Tonight I met one of the French architects working for the city planning commission.

Here's a picture of a Tiger's foot that one of the street vendors around People's Square was selling. Aren't those endangered species or something?

Below is a picture of Nanjing Rd., which is the largest commercial street in China. I encountered the old language barrier while trying to buy some cool pinball-looking candy in one of the shops. I casually turned to the girl next to me and not thinking she spoke any English said "I don't know what she's (the worker's) saying" Surprisingly, Mini :-) had been a tour guide at the 3 gorges? dam (the largest in the world, in central china), so she knew English and we struck up a conversation and browsed through some shops together.



On Saturday, after the Urban Planning Center, we visited the Bund which is one of the first parts of the modern Shanghai. It is a set of western architecture style builidings circa 1900 built on the banks of the Huang Pu River. The Bank of China was housed in the Bund, as well as the customs house for all the shipping (Shanghai is now the world's largest port).

Today Stan and I took a trip to Wal-Mart China, and I went to a Brazillian jazz club with my new friend Ruben. More on that in the next post...it's time for bed.

Happy birthday!

I turned 21 today! Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday messages - I miss all of you!
The attitude I've been taking with the food situation so far has been "order first, ask questions later." Until today I've been lucky and haven't recieved anything that looks like it did while it was still alive so I can always pretend it's chicken. Not tonight - those are frogs. The sight really grossed me out for a while, but I finally tried one. Not too bad, but not worth the effort for the little meat. Mark got his money's worth. Beforehand we saw fried duck hanging in the window of a restaurant - the WHOLE duck. It wouldn't surprise me if they throw these things in while they are still alive. Baba's cooking sounds realllly good right now...well, it always does.

One cool thing about the restaurant was the ordering system. The waiter came with a PDA-like device and sent the order to the kitchen wirelessly. Why don't we have those at home?

It has been quite an eventful birthday so far. Last night, Stan and I decided to explore some more of the city, so we headed in a random direction and walked for about 5 km. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me, but Stan did, he should be uploading the pics soon. The city looks really cool at night because so many of the buildings have incorporated LED :-) lighting effects (LEDs are all over the place - I love it). We followed one glowing haze after another and passed through one more high-business/shopping district with nice stores like Lacoste (more about this later) and the Ritz Shanghai until we found our way into an internet cafe on the fourth floor of a mall. This seemed to be a big hangout for people our age with a hundered computers and everyone watching movies. They had a server with any movie you could ask for a click away (and gigabit ethernet), all licensed of course. We looked up some places to go while we were there and saw a place called "Windows Too" that Stan had heard recommended before. We planned on taking a cab there so we wrote down the address. We didn't need to though because when we asked the girl we were getting pizza (3/10) from where it was, she walked us there. What are the chances in this huge city that it would only be a minute away? Or that someone would be nice enough to personally take us there?
Windows Too, I found out today from a SJTU student, is a really stupid name for the place. Apparently the word for "bar" in Chinese sounds like the number 98...as in Windows 98...duh. After Linux Too, I bought Mission Impossible 3 on DVD for 5 Yuan (~$0.65) and we walked some more until we ended up in a neighborhood with a massage parlor. After passing many of these on our walk, and with our feet aching, we were captivated and were drawn in by the door guy. An hour foot massage was only 6 bucks, but I was let down when my foot soak didn't come with the floating rose petals the picture had promised.

The lady in this picture was one of our "connections" yesterday when we went to look for some cheap brand name clothing. This trip warranted our first ride on the subway - another extremely smart design including doors so people don't fall into the tracks, and displays with arrival time (which were 30 seconds off). As soon as I walked out of the Subway on Shunxi Rd, I was greeted by "you want Rolex?". He led us to an alleyway which we were a little hesitant on stepping into. A few people were standing back there speaking to each other in Chinese so we couldn't understand their plan. I followed our "agent" (he even had a business card!) up into someone's house full of designer bags, watches, suits, sunglasses, and shirts. We bargained with them for a while but left to what else the alleyways had to offer. These guys really wanted our business and it was kind of scary when we were surrounded by them or when they would grab onto your arm. Eventually after an hour and 4 agents later we found the right vendor willing to sell us some nice shirts for 5 bucks. I would love to see the factory where they produce these things because there are thousands of them out there. The DVD factory must be a wonder too. Vendors everywhere are selling thousands of high quality printed (not burned) DVDs complete with a case and artwork for 5 Yuan.

I added a "Call me now" button that you can use to call my cell from your home phone - for free! Make sure you check out the photo album link on the right side. Lastly, thanks for the comments - keep em coming! Someone was nice enough to leave me a proxy that isn't blocked here to access blocked sites with.

6 hours of class today was a little rough, but now it's time to go out to Zapatos. Nite!

china!

Woohoo! After many hours of attempting to find the best blogging/photo sharing combo for my trip....the winner is....Google (what a surprise). The biggest problem I had was deciphering the Chinese on the Blogger page...for some reason it wouldnt let me switch to English. I had also heard that blogger was being blocked by "The great firewall" so I wouldn't be able to use it. I read that they just recently unblocked it although they seem to strictly monitor people's use. The Shanghai Daily News just reported that a guy here was arrested for posting explicit stories .

I have run into a few websites that just seem to have "disappeared" since arriving in China, including Google's cache.


I guess I will try to recap everything from the last two days, although I don't want to write a play by play book.

The 8 hour flight from Honolulu to Tokyo wasn't too bad. There were only two other whities on the 747 with 400 some Japanese tourists. I sat next to a nice guy from the Indonesian army who was in Hawaii for a conference. I asked him about the tsunami and if they had installed any warning systems since then, and sure enough that was what the conference was for. I had seen the warning systems in place all around Hawaii, but it may be a little harder to implement in Indonesia because they have a few more islands - about 70,000 more. Sometimes it can take 3 months to reach one by sea! He highly recommended a visit - I'll add that one to the list.

Tokyo Narita is an awesome airport. It has to be brand new. The whole design seemed very efficient and smart - motion activated moving walkways, informative displays, an automated flight announcement system, and clocks everywhere. I watched a Japanese baseball game in the lounge while I surfed the net complements of the NWA worldclub :-). Mom and dad were suprised to hear from me when I called at 5 am. Sorry guys!
I met a marketing professor from Arkansas Tech while I was eating my lunch. He was on his way to Beijing for a conference but had been to Shanghai before. I mentioned I was reading The World is Flat, which he happened to make his class read last semester.
I passed out for the whole flight to Shanghai and missed my gourmet airline dinner. Boy did my neck hurt after that. We rolled into the gate of the massive brand new Pu Dong international airport and deplaned at about 9:30 pm. After I walked through customs I started to worry since I had no idea how I was going to get to the hotel. I could probably just show a cabbie the address right? Luckily there were some volunteers holding a sign with my name on it and a Georgia Tech flag. Phew!
I met my first study-abroad-mate, Tanner at the airport who had just arrived from Korea. Another girl showed up and we all took an hour bus ride into the city. The volunteers were SO incredibly generous with their help, pushing to carry my luggage. One guy even helped me put my backpack on! We made it to the hotel after a quick cab ride from the bus stop and checked in. I was surprised to see that my roomate was Mark from Gigi's dad's class, it was nice to see a familliar face. The hotel room was a little small, but pretty nice because ITS A HOTEL :-). They come every day and make our beds, clean the room, and give us more tea.
Somehow the next morning we both woke up at 7 which was a shocker because I went to bed at 2. We decided to seize the day and start exploring. There were a bunch of old people outside waving their arms in slow motion. I later found out this sillieness was Tai Chi. We walked down the street and passed a few street vendors (see above) selling breakfast. Mark bought me a thin-crust omelette for a whopping 3 Yuan/RMB since I didn't have any money yet. Yes ladies and gents, that's approximately $0.37 with the dollar at 7.8 RMB. I savored every bite of my first meal in China.

The KFC pic is there because the Chinese people seem to love the Coloniel. I've seen at least 6 of them in the vicinity of campus, which means more friend chicken per capita than even the ATL can compete with. I know I should be experiencing the Chinese culture and not be hanging on to familliarity, but I had to see what all the craze was about so I succumbed today against the advice of my group and bought a leg. It was quite delicious.

We continued walking on Sunday morning for about an hour and passed through an exciting meat and vegetable market with just about any type of animal part you could wish for being offered. We made it back to campus for the 8:30 orientation session. Here we met up with some more friendly volunteers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I chatted with them and got some of their background info. They all attend another campus of the university which is in the city about half an hour away. Dr. Tong Zhou led us around the campus for a tour and then into the surrounding city.

Wow! I never thought China would be so modern (It doesn't even seem like I'm that far away from home with everyone I know only a click away). The city feels a lot like like New York with many people walking around, except there are 10 times the people PLUS the bikers on the streets and the scooters coming at you on the sidewalks. The shopping mall we toured was huge! It was at least 5 Lenox malls combined and included all the brand name stores 5 times over. I opened up a bank account at the Bank of China and got my $20 converted.


Oh yeah, and who was it that said "They all speak English over there?" because that definitely isn't the case! You are not going to want to play charades with me when I get back. Sometimes I crack up right in the middle of a "conversation" because of the fact that I'm speaking totally in English, and they're speaking all Chinese! Most of the time the point gets across though. Stan and I got lunch in one of the million food courts in the supermall. I was a little disappointed by the choices, but Stan was happy about the pork intestines, yumm. Afterwords we set out to buy cell phones which turned out to be a fun experience. We bargained with a couple guys and ended up getting a couple "used" (stolen) phones and prepaid cards for about $25 each. The funny thing was all the phone guys seemed to be friends with one another. They knew the phrase "5 minute" and would make a call or send someone out for a run to gather the right charger or battery.


Last night, we had a group dinner at the hotel which was pretty lethargic. Everyone seemed to be at the same point in their jetlag. I headed upstairs for an early bedtime around 9. Today was our first day of class. I had Thermo and Statistics this morning and 3040 is tomorrow. I hope I can keep up this early rising cycle because class is at 8 everyday, although it seems to be easier because the sun rises at 4:30! I had a couple rounds of bubble tea and had fun launching the tapioca balls from the window of our classroom building. When we walked out of class for a break, we saw two fish on the sidewalk. That was a little weird. It's 12 and time to go to bed. I am so glad I'm done writing this. Goodnight!