Out and about in the city

I can never really think of good ways to start these posts -- so I'll just say that I've successfully completed the second week of HBA, and am extremely glad that it's the weekend, although it's already Sunday and I'll be in class again soon enough. Also, I apologize for the title, which doesn't really mean anything, but I didn't feel creative enough to think of a better title than that.

Academics and accents

There really wasn't a big difference between last week and the first, with the possible exception that I'm getting more used to the class format and I think I am slowly, but hopefully somewhat steadily, improving.

Something that I meant to write about, but forgot to mention, in my Shanghai entries, was about my accent. When I was traveling around Shanghai, in taxis/souvenir shopping/asking for directions, etc., various people would ask me where I was from, since clearly I didn't sound like I was from Shanghai. The responses included Hong Kong, Guangdong, "the south," Taiwan, Singapore (at first I was surprised, but then I remembered that people in Singapore speak Mandarin), and Japan (!), the last of which I was not so pleased about since I didn't think my Chinese was that accented. :(

In any case, I thought that probably once I got to Beijing I'd be surrounded by classmates who had learned perfectly accented Beijing-accented Mandarin. However, this has turned out to be the complete opposite of the truth, much to my amusement. There are 10 students in the fifth-year class, eight of which are undergrads. All eight of us are native speakers, and furthermore, our families all come from the south 南方, which results in predominantly southern-accented Mandarin being spoken. This manifests itself largely in our inability to 卷舌 correctly and a huge lack of erhua 儿化 or the "rrrrrrrr" sound, as I think of it, that's so predominant in Beijingers' speech. This has proved to be a great source of amusement, particularly since Luo Laoshi 骆老师, one of our teachers who is from Tianjin 天津, heavily uses erhua in his speech, in complete contrast to our lack of it.

Pollution

I know this is sort of the pot-calling-the-kettle-black to complain about this, since I'm from LA, but the air pollution is sort of getting to me. It's not even on a day-to-day basis: I don't wake up, for example, and walk outside and think, ugh, more smog today and while the air doesn't really smell either clean or crisp, if you don't think about it you won't really notice that it's as bad as it really is. Instead, the problem lies more in the day-after-day part of it. My idea of summer weather being an endless succession of bright sunny days and blue skies, I think the sun-and-sky combo, or lack of it, is what is starting to get to me. I feel like I'm living in a perpetually gray and dismal weather, which always looks like it's about to rain. As a contrast, clearly Los Angeles is smoggy and polluted, but the aforementioned blue skies and bright sun are always in evidence, particularly in summer. Unfortunately, I've got another six weeks in Beijing (with a break in Inner Mongolia in the middle!)...hopefully I'll be better able to better deal with this as the weeks go by.

In the cab on the way to see Beijing opera we passed through Tian'anmen Square 天安门广场,which was larger than I thought and also kind of barren and concrete, nothing like People's Square 人民广场 in Shanghai. The point of this picture though is to show the sky -- it's like this every single day.

Shopping and dining

On Saturday, a couple of friends and I went to Xiushuijie 秀水街, which is this market unabashedly and entirely aimed at tourists.

The new CCTV 中国中央电视台 building that's under construction. The lines are because I was taking this picture from the backseat of a cab, which are also cheap and spoiling me because once I get back to the East Coast I'm going to start expecting extremely affordable door-to-door service...

I'm not really an argumentative person by nature, especially in a foreign language that I am not entirely comfortable in, so at first I was really reluctant to haggle. But after my friend (and fellow Yalie!) Lena bargained some shirts down to 40 RMB (from some absurd price, probably something like 300 RMB for each), I decided that I had to do it. The first time was really difficult, but after that I discovered I actually kind of like haggling, if only because it feels like a game. In the end I was able to get a couple of winter sweaters down from a ridiculous price of 850 RMB （about $125) to 70 RMB (about $10.20) each.

As opposed to the hardy shoes, I guess...

Lena and I got separated from the other three so we went to go find dinner before going to catch the HBA-organized Beijing Opera 京戏 trip. It was a really nice place...

Dinner is served!

If you've been to China, you've probably already guessed the punch line, so to speak, of this, but we went to eat at...


Pizza Hut! No, really...it's a five-star restaurant in China. And the prices show it, too...our two-person set menu cost 74 RMB per person ($10.80). Even in the States I would consider this a little pricey to pay for a meal, so in China it's ridiculously high. To make a comparison, my lunch at the cafeteria costs anywhere from 6 to 9 RMB ($0.88 to $1.30) and a positively huge bowl of eel rice (trust me, it's actually really good) from the Japanese restaurant downstairs costs 26 RMB ($3.79). Kind of makes you think about the economic disparity that there is in China, even in cities such as Beijing.

There were a couple of families with little kids at Pizza Hut, and I idly guessed that they were probably there for their birthday. Lo and behold, Lena overheard one of the parents sitting at a table close to us tell their kid that he could order what he wanted because it was his birthday. I don't think it would be out of the question at all to venture that they probably only went to Pizza Hut once a year.

It's all Greek (or, in this case, Chinese) to me

After dining in style at Pizza Hut, we caught a cab to the Liyuan Theater 梨园剧场 at the Qianmen Hotel 前门饭店 to watch Beijing opera 京戏, which I perceive to be one of those traditional arts that people watch because it's cultural, i.e. not because there's an extremely high entertainment quotient in it.

Me, Shan and Lena (all 5th-year students) plus Timo, HBA's indefatigable secretary. Who also speaks Chinese extremely well.

Beijing opera itself consists of elaborately-dressed individuals singing with extremely high and somewhat shrill voices that are not intelligible to most Chinese, let alone foreigners. Thus, there are subtitles that are in English and in Chinese on screens on both sides; seeing as we are in China, of course there is bound to be hilarious Chinglish. Unfortunately I wasn't able to snap a picture of it but Timo, the HBA secretary, snapped one so I'm going to try to get the exact wording from him.

The third act of the Beijing opera that we watched involved a considerable amount of martial arts, the most interesting one.

Summing up

In many ways, this second week has been a lot better than the first one -- my grades have improved (a little), I'm beginning to get more of a feel for the campus and I was able to get out to the city. At the same time, however, getting into the city center on Saturday and being able to see some of Beijing has only made me more determined to get out of BLCU 北语 more often, so this is my goal for the next six weeks (not including, of course, the time in Inner Mongolia!)

Beijing, week one

This will be a mostly picture-free post, unfortunately, because (a) I'm too lazy to sift through all the bad pictures I take to find the couple good ones and (b) I've been writing this post over a couple of days so I find snippets of time here or there.

HBA

...is pretty intense. There's a lot of characters to memorize every day, and a lot of grammatical structures of formal Chinese 书面语 that I have never really encountered before, so it's a lot of work. However, the teachers here are absolutely great and because they're all fairly young, it's fun hanging out with them and you don't feel as if it's a very rigid student-teacher relationship and you can relate to them on other levels, which I really appreciate, and think is good for the program, considering that we spend so much time learning Chinese anyway!

I think a lot of HBA students have written about academics already but I'll do it again, particularly for all three of you future 150 (fifth-year students) who read this blog who might want to know. Our current set up is two hours of lecture class 大班课 on the previous night's text and grammar from roughly 8 to 10 in the morning, which for me mainly consists of trying not to fall asleep, taking notes that I can't decipher later and making bad sentences that involve too much colloquial language 口语 for the formal sentence structures I'm supposed to be saying. Then comes two hours of drill 小班课, which usually involves us going over in more detail the structures we've learned and during which I'm usually a little more alert, followed by an hour of one-on-one practice 单班课 in the afternoon during which I make blatant linguistic errors and give answers that are usually entirely irrelevant to the questions being asked. This is followed by my vegging out on the Internet for a while, doing homework in the afternoon, trying to memorize a hundred or so characters and then going to office hours from 7:30 to 9:30 at night, which we have all literally (mis)translated as 办公室小时. My idea in going to these office hours is to get help with homework, but I usually end up chatting 聊天 and getting a minimal amount of work done. I think it's just the fact that spending the entire day shut up in my room (which is excellent, BTW) studying doesn't seem like a good idea.

Haha that makes it sound much more unpleasant than it actually is. In reality, I think it's an excellent setup because it allows you to internalize the material you've learned. Also, I realized I forgot to mention language pledge, probably because it doesn't affect me as much as others. At the same time, though, the language pledge has made me realize how many holes in my vocabulary, and I think it's simply helpful in being able to increase fluency, and, hopefully, accuracy.

I also really like the nine other 5th year students, despite the fact that seven of them go to Harvard :P. Haha it's an excellent group of people and they put up with my vocabulary-limited Chinese and roundabout way of expressing my thoughts.

Finally, perhaps it's a bit early for this, but I am beginning to see the merits of term-time study, so often encouraged by the Light administrators.

The munchies

Enough about academics! Surprisingly, I have not actually been as satisfied with the food as I thought I would be. I think this stems largely from my impressions of food in Asia, which in turn have been made largely from food in Taiwan -- in other words, coming to Beijing has only reaffirmed my belief that southern China 南方 is FAR superior to the north on a culinary basis. For example, I love summer because of fruits, but because we're not supposed to eat fresh fruit without washing and peeling it and definitely not from streetside stands, this essentially restricts me to eating fruit from the supermarket that's easily peel-able (as opposed to, say, grapes). I love seafood and fish, which are not so much in evidence in the BLCU cafeterias.

I'm thinking this may also originate from the fact that I eat largely in the same places on campus, so I think one of my resolutions for the rest of the program is to try to eat out more, considering that it is really not that expensive by American standards.

It's not actually viewable from outer space

Climbing the Great Wall was a blast. The Chinese is literally "climbing the Great Wall" 爬长城, and before getting there I thought this was kind of an exaggeration, but after getting there I realized that this description is actually quite literally true. HBA took us to Simatai 司马台, which is a part of the Great Wall farther out in Beijing but with less tourists. We climbed to the 12th or so watchtower there, going uphill all the way. I haven't been getting much exercise, unfortunately, in Beijing because of my schedule and so climbing the Great Wall to the "end" (that is, to the end of the area that's safe to climb) felt like a big accomplishment.

Okay so there is one picture. Great Wall at Simatai! Unfortunately I didn't notice the glaring camera string in the photo until it was too late...

The thing that kept running through my mind when I was there is how colossally long this is, and how many people must have died (yes, I know this is a bit morbid) in building the wall.

Miscellaneous

- I am bad at haggling, not least because of my semi-proficiency in Chinese. The problem is that I am just proficient enough to sound like an extremely dim-witted, slow Chinese person who has to have everything repeated and speaks funny.

- I have yet to go to any of the famous touristy places in Beijing, with the possible exception of Houhai 后海, as in Tian'anmen Square 天安门广场, the Forbidden City 故宫 or the Lama Temple 雍和宫. I was going to try to make it to the former two on Sunday morning, but seeing as I woke up at noon that plan was sort of squelched.

- I went karaoke-ing on Saturday night and discovered that my Chinese pop song knowledge is sadly lacking, so I've added this to my list of goals this summer, aside from overhauling my Chinese, of course.

- And other than that my life has actually been pretty routine here. I'll check back in next week, with hopefully more interesting tidings for you all.

Shanghai to Beijing

I'm in Beijing!

Also, I've been writing this post over a couple of days, so forgive me if it sounds a bit fragmented. This is also my last day of relative freedom, since tomorrow is the placement exam, classes start on Monday and we’re hitting the Great Wall on Friday, so pretty much this’ll be it for long, thorough, touristy posts. Haha.

Shanghai passé

I spent my third-to-last day strolling around the French Concession 法租界 in Shanghai, which definitely lived up to its “tree-lined” description of it that I kept reading about in all these guidebooks. I took a ton of pictures of the streets, which are beautifully laid out with wide sidewalks, wide traffic lanes and trees growing along the entire way. Since I had the Lonely Planet guidebook with me I sort of followed the walking tour that it laid out which hit up a bunch of the highlights of the district, but because I got too tired I couldn’t exactly follow it. Still, though, the district is absolutely beautiful, and if you’re ever in Shanghai and want a change from the sterility of Pudong or the chaos of the Old City, the French Concession is the place to go.

Beautiful streets...and shady trees, particularly great since there was actually sun there that day.

Also, one of the reasons that I might have liked the French Concession so much is that I saw the sun and blue skies that day!

A quick roundup of the places that I hit up on Wednesday:

(1) Xintiandi 新天地

This is kind of a retail complex with faux-shikumen buildings and super-overpriced food. I hit up the Shikumen Open House Museum 屋里厢石库门居民陈列馆and the site of the 1st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The Shikumen Open House Museum is really cool – it’s a recreation of old Shanghai residences from the 1920s and 1930s. Technically there aren’t any pictures allowed but I took a bunch anyway. It’s a really cool concept, and it’s really impressive that they let you walk through the rooms without any bars or anything separating you from the items.

Apparently, this is a room at one of the corners at the shikumen house, which is the worst room because it gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter, so it was a room often rented out to people, such as writers (such as Lu Xun!)

The site of the first national congress of the CCP is really only interesting if you know a bit about Chinese history, which, thanks to Spence, I do -- otherwise it’s not really worth a visit. Though it’s free. No pictures allowed here either.

(2) Sun Yat-sen’s Former Residence 孙中山故居

More or less what it claims to be. Again, the usual pattern of museum with artifacts, followed by a slightly-less-than-impressive house. At this point, I was getting a little tired of museums, so I didn’t really stay that long.

Father of the (Chinese) Country, aka 国父

(3) The Moller House 马勒别墅

This wasn’t open. It’s a nice-looking Scandinavian-style house in the middle of Shanghai, so the juxtaposition is kind of incongruous.

Unfortunately it wasn't open. But isn't this random, a Scandinavian building in the middle of the former French Concession in the Chinese city of Shanghai?

(4) Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre 宣传画年画艺术中心

This place has a really cool collection of propaganda posters dating from 1949 to about 1979 or so. The admission is 20 RMB and it’s really interesting to be able to see the pictures for real. Don’t, however, get anything from the adjoining gift store -- I think it’s overpriced (obviously the posters are super-expensive) and you can get most of the Cultural Revolution memorabilia elsewhere.

Self-explanatory.

Shanghai future

On my second-to-last day in Shanghai I more or less spent it strolling around Pudong, which is actually a really boring place to walk around because there’s nothing on the streets, which are super-wide, and it’s just filled with skyscrapers, which, while interesting, get kind of boring after a while. The only reason I went was to go up the Jinmao Tower 金茂大厦 to get some views of Shanghai. At 70 RMB admission, the view had better be good, and it was, except that the omnipresent pollution of Shanghai sort of clouded the view, which was really unfortunate. Still, though, I was able to get some good shots of the city.

The Oriental Pearl Tower in the foreground and the Huangpu River and the Bund in the background. It's kind of sad that there's so much pollution that from the Jinmao Tower you can't really see much.

After I got out of the Jinmao Tower I walked back to the metro stop at Lujiazui, but along the way I was able to take some snapshots of these two impressive towers in Shanghai:

Left: the Jinmao Tower. Right: the Shanghai World Financial Centre 上海环球金融中心.

Then at night, Gang, Rosie, Jiaona and I went walking along the Bund before the lights turned off at 10 pm and went on a mad photo-taking session as we walked along. It’s really a gorgeous street at night, and thanks to some help from Gang I think my night pictures of the Bund and Pudong turned out better. Unfortunately a lot of the pictures are spread among the four cameras that we have so I'm just picking one that I have that I like.

The Customs House.

All in all, I had a really good time in Shanghai these last couple of days. It was nice to start my summer in China with a city that encapsulates so much of China at once and, in my view, has a lot of history. I mean, obviously Beijing and other older cities have more traditional Chinese history, but Shanghai in my mind demonstrates some of the most interesting parts -- the concessions, foreigners in China, China’s 改革开放, etc. There isn’t another city in China in which you can get such a good idea of the influence that foreigners have had on the country, which is something that I think has been Also I had a blast hanging out with all of the Bulldogs. It was great.

Storms, pollution, traffic and mud

After a fairly uneventful plane ride from Shanghai Hongqiao airport 虹桥机场 we landed in Beijing, where the first thing I noticed immediately was the heavy, heavy smog and pollution. Granted, as I learned later, it was about to rain -- but still! According to the informational map and display we were at 2000 ft but outside my window all I could see were gray skies. Then I look down and all of a sudden realize that the ground is rapidly, rapidly approaching and in a minute or so we land, all amid this huge haze. I thought Shanghai was bad -- it's nothing compared to Beijing. It's absolutely ridiculous. Also, the ride back to BLCU took up three and a half hours (and it’s like a 30 km ride), mainly because the traffic was just horrendously slow.

Walking around yesterday and this morning was pretty miserable because of the rain that’s been coming down and the unpaved streets outside of BLCU, so my flip-flop-wearing habits have become rapidly curtailed since arrival at BLCU, since one trek outside in the mud and rain has quickly taught me that that wasn’t really a good idea. Hopefully it’ll get better soon. And of course there hasn’t been any sun, which isn’t really a surprise.

Other than that, I’ve basically just been going through the motions of settling in, so I won’t bore you with that stuff. Suffice it to say that I’m enjoying my last day of freedom before Chinese classes and school start and I have to start speaking Chinese 24-7. In a way I’m kind of looking forward to the language pledge because it’ll give me an excuse to just try my best and speak, mistakes and all, and hopefully I’ll be able to improve much more quickly than I have been.

Metropolis infested with foreign adventurers

...or so says the Shanghai History Museum in a description of concession-era Shanghai.

In the last two days, I've been out and about Shanghai, the first day with a bunch of the Bulldogs here and today on my own. I probably (actually, make that definitely) won't post as often once I get to Beijing, and probably they won't be as long as this one will probably end up being, but I figure I might as well write a bunch while I can.

Impressions and neighborhoods

Shanghai's a huge city, and its neighborhoods are totally different from each other. The Bulldogs are staying at the Rayfont Hotel (上海南普瑞峰酒店) in the Old City in southern Shanghai. The neighborhood around here is fairly un-Westernized, very traditional and in parts quite poor. Depending on which streets you take, if you walk south towards the nearest metro station you walk through a neighborhood that is in part fairly dirty and squalid. It makes you think about the economic renaissance that China is going through, and at the same time how many people are left out of it. When I was looking for the metro stop on Sunday, I came across a sign in Chinese that I pieced together to say something along the lines of "Congratulations to the residents for signing the agreement to move into new homes!" In much of the literature that I've read about China, I always seem to run across something that deplores the destruction of the old architecture, whether it's the hutongs 胡同 in Beijing or the shikumen 石库门 in Shanghai and its replacement with "soulless modern architecture" or some variant thereof. But having actually walked through some of these neighborhoods, and realizing how run-down some of these buildings are, I'm not so sure that we have the right to criticize the destruction of all this architecture. It might be historic, but historic doesn't necessarily equal humane for the people living there.

But at the same time, if you walk north from this hotel, you walk through a neighborhood that, while not Westernized in architecture and still packed with people (and nothing like Pudong or the French Concession), is full of bustling shops and tons of people strolling around and generally seems like a good traditional shopping area.


This is on the way to the Yuyuan Gardens. Ignoring the modern-looking architecture in the background, the foreground is what this part of Shanghai looks like.

So that's the Old City. Then there's Pudong 浦东, which is the shiny new part of Shanghai on the west bank of the Huangpu River 黄浦江 and is totally different and Westernized and new. Rosie and I went walking along the Bund 外滩 last night and I snapped a ton of pictures. There's not that much to be said that you can't really see in the picture, except for the fact that the Oriental Pearl Tower 东方明珠塔 is one of the most distinctive buildings I've ever seen.


Pudong! This is before we walked back in the other direction and saw the upper pearl of the tower swathed in a polluted haze.

And finally there's the European-style architecture of the Bund and the French Concession 法国租界. A couple of us went to eat at a restaurant (which in itself is a whole other story) located in the French Concession last night and when we got out of the metro it was like we were in a totally different city. The street was wide, there was an actual sidewalk, all that stuff in the guidebooks about "tree-lined boulevards" actually turned out to be true and, aside from the Chinese characters of course, we could have been walking in any European or East Coast city. Which I guess is not surprising, but it was still a little jarring to see the difference. I'm going to try to go back to the French Concession tomorrow or Thursday and snap some pictures of the streets.


Yours truly in front of the Customs House, Bank of Communications building and Russo-Chinese Bank on the Bund.

Getting around

I've largely been getting around on the Shanghai Metro, with a couple of taxi rides. The metro's really nice (aka clean and cheap, unlike the New York subway, for instance), with a couple of caveats:

(1) The absurd opening hours (this is the really irritating one)
Last night, Rosie and I discovered that line 8 of the Metro closes before 10 pm. What?! Perhaps people don't really go out at night here (something that I HIGHLY doubt), but some of the lines close ridiculously early here, forcing you to take a taxi back. Luckily taxis aren't that expensive (they're like 11 RMB for the first two kilometers or something like that

(2) The incompleteness of the system
I guess this isn't really a system flaw, because the system's really new, but it's irritating.

(3) System maps portraying the future
Some guidebooks and maps have the bright idea to print maps for distribution that include the numerous lines under construction or being planned. That's great if you're interested in the system's development, but if you're trying to get somewhere it makes things a little difficult, because you don't want to plan to take a line that doesn't currently exist.

Yuyuan Gardens 豫园

This is a set of gardens that dates from the Ming dynasty in the northern part of the Old City in Shanghai. The shops around this area are super-touristy but the garden's quite pretty and the way that the stone walls are set up the whole area seems larger than it actually is.



Awesome dragon.

Shanghai Museum 上海博物馆

If you're a museum person at all, I recommend this museum -- it's got a ton of good collections of Chinese art, calligraphy, sculpture and bronzes. And there's a temporary exhibition on loan from the British Museum about the ancient Olympic Games as well, which is only going to be here until July. Plus it's free. Apparently the bronzes are supposed to be the centerpiece of the collection but I never really made it there because I started with my favorite things (calligraphy) on the third floor and I got pretty tired wandering around the seal, Ming and Qing dynasty furniture, Chinese coins and minority nationality art (really) collections.



This is probably my favorite piece of calligraphy in the entire collection.


There's a whole gallery devoted to "China's minority nationalities" that includes tons of wax figures dressed up like this.

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre 上海城市规划展示馆

The name sounds really boring but it's actually a lot of fun. Basically it's this whole museum dedicated to the future of the city and how it's going to be this amazing environmentally-friendly transport-convenient metropolis of the future. There's a bunch of exhibits on Pudong, the airports, green Shanghai, etc., but the really cool exhibit is on the third floor where they have this huge model of Shanghai as it apparently will look in a couple of years. I think this was definitely worth the 30 RMB that I paid to get in.


Wow. Just wow.


This is in the lobby of the museum. It's kind of Star Wars-esque if you ask me. It's like the "Greatest Hits" of Pudong. Also, you can see part of the sign that says 城市，让生活更美好 or "Better City, Better Life."

Shanghai Municipal History Museum 上海市历史陈列馆

This museum is in the bottom of the Oriental Pearl Tower. The admission for the museum is 35 RMB (if you go up to the top of the tower the admission is different, there's like seven different fares depending on how high you want to go and what you want to see.)


It's somewhere in here. Also, it's amazing how low the clouds/smog/fog were.

This museum was excellent, except for the part in which my camera ran out of batteries halfway through. It takes you through Shanghai's history through use of a ton of wax figures and model streetscapes from the early Ming dynasty era to the end of the concession era in the 1940s. There isn't much on the history of the city from say 1949 to until about 1990 (when suddenly economic reforms emerge), which isn't surprising given this government's preference for rewriting history. Anyway, I really liked the museum, even if wax figures are kind of corny, because the way it's set up, particularly in the concession-era portions, is like a mock streetscape, so you sort of get a feeling for what walking Shanghai during that time must have been like. (This is also where there's a plaque that describes the concession era as one in which Shanghai was a "metropolis infested with foreign adventurers." All in all, though, the propagandistic level of the explanations in the museum is actually pretty low, lower than I was expecting.)


The dastardly British arrive and begin Shanghai's "semi-colonial and semi-feudal" era!


An opium den.


So far as I can tell, an actual boundary stone from the French Concession from the early Republican period.


A miniature of an early-1900s streetscape.

...

If it looks like I have a particular love for museums, it's because it's been raining all day today, and a walk along the Bund and strolling the French Concession didn't really seem like good ideas today.

All in all, though, these last two days have been pretty amazing. I've been able to see a ton of the city, and with two days left before I head north to Beijing on Friday, hopefully I'll be able to explore the French Concession a bit and get a bird's-eye view of Shanghai from the Jinmao Tower 金茂大厦 in Pudong. But in any case, I'm having a ton of fun, stretching my legs and making the most of these last few days of vacation before the grind of HBA begins. :)

Airline adventures and Shanghai start

So I'm here, in Shanghai, after what surprisingly wasn't that bad of a journey (aside from an hour or so in Hong Kong, which I'll get to in a moment) at the hotel in which my friends Gang and Rosie are staying.

To start from the beginning, the 14-hour-40-minute flight from LAX to Hong Kong wasn't actually as unbearable as I would've expected it to be. Maybe it's just a function of getting older, or getting more used to these cross-country flights that I'm always doing now. In any case, I slept on and off for quite some time and watched a couple of movies and presto! I was landing in Hong Kong.


I like taking pictures of scenery and landscapes, so I took pictures of Hong Kong airport as I was waiting. (particularly because of the pretty mountains in the back.)

Unfortunately, I got into the terminal to discover that my flight to Shanghai had been canceled, and so I had to stand in line behind this guy from Italy who was getting increasingly ticked off that the super-overworked woman behind the counter couldn't magically make his tickets appear out of nowhere. If I hadn't been so nervous that I would be stuck in Hong Kong for ages I probably would have felt sorrier for the clerk and more irritated at the man.

On second thought, though, there are MUCH worse airports to be stuck in for a long layover than Hong Kong airport. It's a beautiful airport and the duty-free shopping is astounding.

The flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai was fine, after I managed to get on one (it was only 2 hours and yet they served a full meal of which I of course took full advantage. Take that, American airlines!) Again indulging my like of random scenic pictures, I took some snapshots of a random Hong Kong village:


My first impression upon getting into Shanghai and the cab ride to this hotel was the absolute grayness of the sky -- I'm from LA, so it's not as if I'm a stranger to air pollution, but at the least the sky is blue. Here it was just absolutely gray. I can't decide if it's because of smog or fog...I'm inclined to think the former, since it's already early afternoon.

In that vein, this is (one of) the views from one of the rooms at this hotel:


There's some interesting-looking ruin-type things in the front of this second photo but I'm not entirely sure what they are.

My most overwhelming impression, in the end, though, is that it reminds me a lot of being in Taiwan -- the super-strong AC (which, apparently, is called 空调 in China, as opposed to 冷气 which is what I always grew up saying) and the muggy, humid, hot air outside. I guess I'm back in Asia!

Departure

I'm leaving for China tonight, so in 24 hours I'll be at Hong Kong International Airport boarding my flight for Shanghai (and I'll land in Shanghai on Sunday at noon, if everything goes according to schedule.)

It's kind of weird to think that I'm leaving the country for so long -- I've never been abroad for this amount of time before, and not by myself, either. I'm really excited though, a few last-minute jitters aside.

So probably the next post will be from China -- hopefully the flights won't be too bad.