Alive and well in Shanghai!

Good news: I am alive and well and in China! Bad news: the air quality is atrocious.
I’m starting off the semester with a group tour in Shanghai. I like the pace of the tour; we get to do a lot and see a lot, yet I don’t feel rushed or exhausted because we’re doing too much.
But Shanghai is a city where the sun shines brown. The kind of city that makes you wonder if you’ll ever see the blue sky again. I feel as though I cannot fully inflate my lungs, like my heart is constantly beating too fast, and that the air that does manage to find its way in is thickly layered with grit and grime.
That aside, there are a lot of fun things to do in Shanghai and I’m having a great time. On Tuesday (the day after I arrived), we went on a tour of Old Shanghai. We saw the Jade Buddha Temple, which has a gigantic sitting Sakyamuni made out of white jade. Since it was the first of the month of the Chinese lunar year, loads of people were in and around the temple, lighting handfuls of incense and filling the air with smoke and prayers.

Later that day we went to Yuyuan Garden, which is this really wonderful natural escape from the big city surrounding it. It is a traditional Chinese garden, which means that all four elements (I’m not sure what they are, but I think one of them is mountain and another is water) are incorporated. The mountain bit was accomplished by a carved rock that rock climbers would love because of all the excellent handholds. It was really nice: a beautiful garden, though a bit too much stone (it was entirely paved) for my taste. I love the architecture here—it’s softer, rounder, less severe. The round doors in the garden made me think of hobbits!



On Wednesday we went to Xitang, a small town about two hours outside of Shanghai. This adorable town seriously exemplified my silly westerner’s view of China. There was not a single house bereft of red lanterns; canals filled the city (in fact, we saw the town’s fire department from the 1960’s: a boat); the main method of transportation was carts. Apparently part of Mission Impossible 3 was filmed here. There are pictures of Tom Cruise randomly distributed throughout the whole town.




Thursday was “Modern Shanghai” day. It was a walking day (which I thoroughly enjoyed). Our first stop was the Bund Underwater Sightseeing Tunnel, which wasn’t much more than a tunnel filled with lights, random spoken phrases, and creepy inflatable jesters (like the big blow-up Santa Clauses you see around Christmas time).

After that we got to go to the top of Jinmao Tower, the tallest building in Shanghai. The building was constructed hollow in the center, complete with viewing panel at the very top of the building (the 88th floor), so we could see all the way down to the lobby on the first floor. It was awesome. Check out the spirals made by those little balconies.


On Thursday afternoon we went to a Chinese market. Here they give foreigners highly inflated prices and you have to bargain your way down to about a third of the price they name. I never thought I would be saying this, but bargaining is so much fun! Seriously. The other great thing about the market was that I got an opportunity to talk to some Chinese salespeople. This guy in my group who I was wandering around with, Will, decided he was going to pretend to be a salesperson, so he sat down and started trying to sell shoes. The shopkeepers around us really got a kick out of this and so they started talking to us and quizzing us on our Chinese vocabulary. They ended up telling us (in Chinese) that we shouldn’t bother going to Chengdu—we should stay in Shanghai with them and they would teach us all the Chinese we needed to know!
Today (Friday) was a free day, so I went to the Shanghai Museum (it’s a history museum, one of the best in China) with several other people from my group. My favorite part was the coin exhibit—it was a comprehensive collection of Chinese currency from when it was first introduced to the country to modern day. It was fascinating! They were arranged chronologically, so you could watch technology improving and learn about the different methods they used for casting coins. The other really interesting part of the coin exhibit for me was watching the orthographic evolution of Chinese characters. For those of you who don’t know, the Chinese character system did not always look the way it does today. The characters used to be a lot rounder, very different from what they are today.
Tomorrow we’re flying to Chengdu—my new home! My best to you all—I love you and miss you and can’t wait to see you again soon.