there is only one time zone in china: BEIJING TIME

i just returned from a trip to beijing a few days ago. this trip was easily both the best and worst trip i have ever been on. we went on the sketchiest tour ever (i guess you get what you pay for -- a too good to be true price for an all inclusive package to beijing for 5 days), but despite its dubious tactics, we did hit up all of the mingsheng guji aka scenic spots and historical sites. beijing is a fantastic city! there is so much history there, it's no surprise chinese people are so proud of having 5000 years of history. the excitement about the olympics is overwhelming. right now, the olympics is all anyone cares about, so it will be really interesting to see what unfolds and especially how it effects the people in beijing and all of china.

the trip began with an overnight train leaving shanghai thursday evening. the train was good fun because our group took up an entire train car. we had soft sleepers and each cabin-cubicle (there were no doors) was comprised of 6 bunks, so it was like a giant 34 person sleepover. we arrived in beijing around 9am the next day welcomed by beautiful weather (check out those blue skies!!) and our soon to be demonized tour guide (daoyou=tour guide in chinese). we immediately headed on to tiananmen square, which is HUGE and was filled with about a billion tourists.






mao's mausoleum is located in tiananmen, so we headed there next to wait in a line 5x as long as any i've ever seen at disneyland to see mao's embalmed corpse. they really hustled us through there and didn't allow cameras, so i unfortunately couldn't snatch a picture of what was clearly a wax figure (they rotate the wax copy and the real body throughout the day so as to keep the real guy better preserved), draped in the old communist flag of the USSR.

after the mao-soleum, we took what should have been a quick visit to the NPC (national people's congress....the congress building of china) which turned into the 1st of many debacles with our tour guide. he argued with us (by us i mean the people who could speak chinese....because this guy only spoke chinese) for about 20 minutes, claiming there was no student discount, when we could all clearly see the sign in english: student price - 15yuan (half of the general admission).

after the NPC we headed to lunch, which we were all impatiently awaiting as it was well into the afternoon and no one had eaten anything the entire day!

quick side note on organize tours in china (besides DONT GO ON ONE!!!): tour agencies are regulated by the government and therefore are required to take tourists to specific government operated "restaurants" (because "food" is included) that all serve the same awful food and to government owned souvenir shops, although tourists are not obligated to do buy anything. if tour guides don't take enough tours to these shops, they have to pay a premium when they want to renew their tour guide license.....this is china folks

so the first restaurant turned out to be infested with rats!! yes rats (plural because there were 7!!!) were hanging out in the kitchen and when we refused to eat there, the staff was confused because they said the rats were only in the part where they wash the dishes, not where they cook the food. which clearly changes everything? we ended up buying our own lunches that day, which for some, was comprised of donkey meat sandwiches aka an asswich. i pulled the veggie card and avoided the asswiches.

by the time we got to the temple of heaven it was practically closing, so even if we had wanted to purchases additional tickets to see the different parts inside (our tour guide tried to convince us that just to get into the main area was 60kuai, and to go in the other parts was an additional 20kuai for each one, and therefore wasnt worth it -- it was really only 8kuai to get in or 28 for a ticket that included entry to everything!) it was at this point, now well into the evening, that we learn from our tour guide that we don't actually have hotel accommodations because beijing has some exceedingly discriminatory laws regulating which hotels can rent to foreigners and which can't. apparently the one they booked for us could not, which was a big problem as we were all americans and only half could pass for chinese. we ended up finding our own hostel, which we had to pay for ourselves because the tour agency refused to. (we later found out that a lot of the tickets this agency purchases for us were obtained illegally and we are now involved in some sort of lawsuit against them and even had the US embassy on the phone; however, i think given the recent senate resolution on china, the us embassy probably, and hopefully, has more important things to occupy its time).

the only redeeming quality of our first day in beijing was the fact that i was going to see dj tiesto at was was supposedly one of the coolest clubs in china! after loading up on some beijing specialty rice liquor we went to see tiesto and it was amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!

.......until we had to be in the lobby of our hostel at 8am the next morning to go to the forbidden city. the forbidden city is huge!!! it really is a city. it was pretty nuts to actually be there after seeing it in so many movies.

afterwards we had an awful lunch at another one of the government operated restaurants, sans rats we hope, we went to jingshan, which was cool because you could climb up to a pagoda which had great views of the forbidden city, and then to beihai park, which was a nice, but not too interesting park. and they didn't let us lie on the grass. i guess that's why it looked so well kempt and inviting.

view of the forbidden city from the top of jingshan (well kind of view....view of brown air)

after another long night on the town in beijing, at a place called Vic's, we convened in the lobby once again at 8am (i think i was running on less than 5 hours of sleep in 2.5 days) to find a new tour guide (yay!!!) who is super friendly and could speak english (double yay!!!). this guy was really great and provided background information on the places we were going to and walked us through the sites explaining things as we went along....pretty much what tour guides are supposed to do, right? anyway, zhong he (that's his name) took us to see the olympic stadium, or niu chao -- bird's nest as it is called here on our way to the summer palace. the summer palace was basically a vacation home for the ming and qing emperors. it is incredibly expansive and beautiful and i would definitely want to be a concubine if it meant i got to live here!! as zhonghe explained to us: china has a one wife policy, but you can have many girlfriend. that night we were too exhausted to do anything more than eat dinner at Hooters
Beijing and walk home. we had a big day ahead of us.





we met in the lobby at 7am the next day to go to the ming tombs and then the GREAT WALL (chang cheng)!!!! the great wall is amazing. it's completely surreal to be climbing on the great wall. the great wall of china seems sooooo far away in both time and space when you learn about it in school or see it in kungfu movies set in imperial china. it was really mind-blowing to be up there. but as it turns out, the great wall isn't the only attraction at the great wall....I and every other white person were also attractions! i can't even count how many times i've been stopped by chinese tourists asking to take pictures of me....i feel like one of the people at disneyland, dressed up like mickey mouse or cinderella (and yes i realize this is the 2nd allusion to disneyland in one post...) at one end of the great wall a group of maybe 10 asked for pictures with me and tony, one by one, until they all had their souvenir of seeing a white person at the great wall....and then we took a group shot.

this was the last stop of the organized tour, so from then on we were free to do what we liked. we went to the silk market, a huge 6 floor building of fake designer goods from iphones to designer purses. after a little bargain shopping we headed up to the 6th floor to get peking duck at a place called quan jude, supposedly the most famous peking duck restaurant in all of beijing...which pretty much makes it the best in the world. and daaannnggg was this good duck!!

on our last day in beijing i decided to go back to the temple of heaven to see it for real. the temple was pretty cool, although the weather was awful, but the best part was the park that the temple is located in. all the old people in china go to parks early in the morning to exercise. so we saw huge groups of 65+ year olds doing ribbon dancing, taijiquan, taijiquan with swords, chinese yo-yo and singing. an old man taught me how to do the yo-yo and i suck at it.

then we headed to the lama temple, which is the most renown tibetan buddhist temple outside of tibet. this was the most interesting and beautiful of all of the temples i've been to. and the ratio of people coming to worship to tourists was much more favorable than any other place. then we spent about 2 hours in a tibetan buddhist store near the temple looking at all sorts of cool tibetan things. and i bought some prayer flags.









after that me and adam headed to hutong, which are these long, narrow alley ways formed in between traditional beijing style architecture houses that are all built in the shape of squares, with the middles cut out for courtyards. originally only one family would live in a hutong, but they became a sort of low-income housing with many families sharing a hutong. we picked a hutong street, on recommendation from our chinese friend Sylvia who is from beijing, called Nanluoguxiang, which was really cool. the hutongs on both sides of the street had all been converted into really cool cafes, boutiques and craft stores. we ate at one of the best indian restaurants i've ever been to and then got lost trying to make our way to houhai lake. on our way to the lake we stopped in one of the cafes called NLGX, which turned out to be owned by a recent UC Irvine grad and had just opened about a month ago. he told us all about starting a business in china, not knowing any chinese at all, although he is ethnically chinese, and dealing with contractors and bribing police. we were making some guanxi....connections!









then we returned to tiananmen square for the last stop on our trip to beijing for the flag lowering ceremony, which was a very holistic and full circle way to complete our trip. the ceremony was nothing special really....they just took the flag down. but there were sooooo many people there and the sky was really dark and ominous, so it had a cool feel.







and then it was back on the train for another overnight trip returning to shanghai!

there is no earth hour in china/my first encounter with chinese bureaucracy

.....................NOT!! (apparently this only applies in gardens with ancient pagodas)

last week adam and i attempted to set up a recycling program in the international student dorm because we assumed that, like us, many other students in this 23 story building were accumulating absurd quantities of water bottles on account of the tap water here being unsafe to drink. there is no official, state-run recycling program in shanghai, but there is a sort of unofficial system where guys on bikes come around and buy used bottles from the guards ate the gate of our dorm and then sell them back to factories, who "supposedly" recycle/reuse them, for a small profit. we coordinated with Yao Xin, a representative from the California House (basically the UC Center at Fudan University) to help us (as in translate) meet with the campus environmental club. this is a run through of how the recycling venture went:

12:30pm: meet with the environmental club at the giant mao statue on campus

we explain to yao, who then explains to them, our proposal: put some sort of receptacle on every floor for students to put their empty glass and plastic bottles into, arrange for a volunteer from each floor to take said bins to the gate of campus and deposit them into a bigger receptacle for the recycling guys to pick up. we didnt want to sell them the bottles either, just give them away, so we could get rid of the bottles in a responsible way. we also wanted to make some flyers to post around the building to inform students that they could recycle their bottles. the environmental club gave us some suggestions on where/how to get bins (grocery stores give away big cardboard boxes) and offered to help us with poster-making supplies. so far so good

1:00pm: bike back to the dorm to talk with the guards and the dorm administrators about our idea

as we ride back, Yao informs us that we will probably have some difficulty getting this approved by both the guards and the dorm staff. apparently the environmental club tried to set up a used paper collecting program in the undergrad dorms, and the dorm staff refused because they saw it as a pointless interference with their already "smooth" running dormitory. he also had a feeling the dorm staff would be unwilling to let us put up our posters. everyone here has their system established and is acutely close-minded when it comes to interference.

1:15pm: yao talks to the guards

apparently the giant crate of bottles near the gate of the dorm is already a "recycling" program. the guards sell these bottles to the guys on bike-pulled carts in order to maintain the air pump at the gate, which is used to refill bike tires. they don't want us to set up a "rival" source of bottles for the recycling guys that would reduce the revenue for the guards. of course we had no idea that there was any sort of recycling system, and were willing to give them all of our bottles. WE JUST WANT TO RECYCLE!!! we're not trying to make a "profit" (1 mao per bottle, which is the equivalent of a chinese dime, divide a US dime by 7 and that's how much 1 bottle is worth). we figured we could just make their system even more profitable, and more efficient, by putting receptacles on each floor and then taking all the bottles to their crate every week, instead of relying on students to use their mind-reading capabilities to figure out that they should bring their recyclable items to this crate. well the guards don't deal with anything that goes on inside the dorm, we have to talk to the dorm staff.

1:30pm: meet with the head of the dorm (a very stern looking chinese lady, who kept shooting me an "are you crazy" look -- maybe i shouldn't have worn my nelson mandela shirt?)

after yao explains to her our idea in length, she responds for what seems like hours in some very harsh sounding chinese. this doesn't look promising. she says we can't set up a recycling program, because there already is one (we keep hearing this, yet recycling seems pretty much nonexistent and definitely poorly advertised): the cleaning ladies on every floor pick through the trash and take out the recyclable items, which the guards then sell and they all get a cut of the 1mao per bottle. it seems a little ridiculous that these ladies have to sift through the trash and our idea of putting a bin on each floor for bottles didn't appear to conflict with the system in place. in fact, it seemed to me and adam that this would actually increase their efficiency and save them from what we viewed as the demeaning task of digging through waste. but folks, this is communist china - where efficiency goes to die and bureaucracy trumps all. according to the dorm administrator, this system is in fact perfect. if we were to interfere by putting bins, then the cleaning ladies wouldn't have a job to do and it would most likely confuse students by having 2 bins, even though we said we would put a very clear sign (perhaps the internationally recognized 3 green arrows forming a triangle could suffice as a symbol for recycling). after essentially accusing us of being cultural imperialists, expecting students from over 85 countries to conform to californian values of conservation and recycling, she thanked us for our interest and said they would maybe put a sign somewhere letting students know that their trash was being sorted and "recycled."

the berkeley student, silverlake resident, and former pseudo-vegetarian inside of me are kicking and screaming with frustration, but until i get back to california, i will throw out my plastic and glass bottles and eat meat and ignore human rights abuses!

苏州 - the venice of the orient

first of all, i added a link to picasa photo album, which is where all the pictures that i don't have the patience to put in the blog can be found.  hopefully it works.

two weekends ago we took a trip to suzhou, pronounced soo joh, (苏州) a city located about 45 minutes away from shanghai by train. suzhou is called the venice of china because it is a water city, full of canals...like the real venice. suzhou is also known for its gardens, because it's full of them!! we left early saturday morning, walked to the metro station, took the metro to the train

 station and then a train to suzhou (which was surprisingly cheap, 11RMB, for a pretty nice

 train; i've heard horror stories about chinese trains, but this was definitely not one of those

 trains).

 

we headed to the ming han tang hostel, where we planned on staying, to drop off our bags before exploring the city, which is where the complications arose. firstly, none of the taxi drivers we showed the address to had any idea where it was and secondly, there is massive construction going on in suzhou right now, so it is really difficult for cars of any sort to get around. this is how we ended up taking 2 and 4 person motorized rickshaws to our hostel! upon arriving we learned that not only did the reservation adam had made the night before not go

 through, but they also did not have enough space to accommodate our group for the night

 because there were 14 of us. crap. after about 45 minutes of searching all the other hostels in suzhou the staff at ming han tang helped us find rooms at another hostel and booked it for us.

by the time we all got to the other hostel and figured everything out, we only had time for 1 garden, because they all close by about 530. we decided to start with the humble

 administrator's garden, which was about a 10 minute walk along a canal from our hostel (also on a canal). 

 the humble administrator's garden is the biggest of the suzhou gardens and i

 almost accidently missed the majority of the garden. after circling through the area near the entrance several times, i thought i had seen it all and didn't want to look at the same

 unblooming flora (unfortunately most of the plants in these gardens won't bloom for another month or so...) until 530, so i left with a few friends. after leaving we discovered that we had

 actually missed the main part of the garden and luckily i still had my ticket, so they let me back in! unfortunately tony was not so lucky. this garden really was enormous!! there were ponds,

 rock formations, gazebos, trees, and a bonsai garden! unfortunately, these gardens are THE

 tourist attraction for suzhou, so it was really crowded and not quite the peaceful, 

reflective setting it must have been for the humble administrator!

bonsai garden!!!

after leaving the humble administrator's garden we decided to take the equivalent of a gondola ride on one of the canals before getting dinner. luckily we had andrew with us, who is basically fluent in mandarin and bargained our boat ride down to 20rmb per person. we hopped in our boats for a leisurely ride in the canal while our boatman serenaded us with christmas songs

 (because, as we've discovered, christmas never ends in china....there are still christmas

 decorations and christmas trees everywhere!!) and frere jaques (i have noo idea how to spell

 that one) in chinese. he occasionally switched over to chinese songs, which sounded more like the final screeches of a dying cat!

everyone on the boat

after a quick stop back at the hostel, we headed towards the main street in suzhou to find dinner and good bargain shopping. the restaurant we ate dinner at wins a gold star for its fantastic translations of chinese dishes into english for the english menu, such as:

we got an early start on sunday and headed to the master of nets garden (网师圆) after quickly grabbing some street food. i really like the master of nets garden, which is the smallest of the suzhou gardens and much more tranquil. this garden really seemed like it could have been

 some ancient chinese person's garden. and then my camera died. and my phone.

after master of the nets garden, we went to the lion forest garden (狮子林), which was more of a rock formation maze than a garden, but it was awesome. i'd enter one part of the rock maze and wander through, each path leading me somewhere completely unexpected and would emerge to see friends popping out of various spots in the rocks like prairie dogs.

then we headed off to tiger hill (虎丘). tiger hill is a huge, beautiful garden/park thing that contains the oldest pagoda in the yangtze river delta area. the place was so huge that even though there were quite a few tourists...it felt like we had the place to ourselves.  

only one of many amazing signs at tiger hill

the oldest pagoda....ever!!!!

we wandered through a bamboo forest and desecrated the harmony by taking obscene pictures. we restored some of the yin (or is it yang) by sitting peacefully near a pond, waiting to catch glimpses of jumping fish.

then we walked down an alley right outside of tiger hill jam-packed with stalls selling all sorts of antiques and souvenirs. we grabbed some street food dumplings (饺子) and milk tea before getting into a somewhat sketchy minivan with a drive who offered to take us to the night market. in china they really understand the meaning of minivan...unlike american minivans, which are still obscenely huge vehicles, these minivans are truly mini. despite our worries that

 this guy was about to take us to some dark alley where him and his buddies would harvest our organs, we arrived at the night market with all of our kidneys. 

the night market was more alleys full of stores and stalls selling all sorts of things from socks and lingerie to lanterns to hiphop clothes to knock-off designer purses (on which the leather felt suspiciously like plastic...) to birds to dumpling soup, which we ate for dinner (the dumpling soup...not birds) at a place where you watch the guy make fresh noodles before you eat them!

monday morning we woke up, learned that riots had just broken out in tibet and explored the other side of the canal by our hostel. we stumbled upon a very local, outdoor market, bustling with monday morning shoppers, where we bought the most delicious muffins of my life (3kuai for about 30 little muffins!) and saw vendors selling all sorts of fresh food items: tarps covered in ginger, huge bags of mushrooms and chili peppers, both pre and post butchered snails,

 turtles, crabs, chickens, and other sorts of unidentifiable meats, and fresh fruit and vegetables!

market

afterwards we visited the silk museum that had duplicates of some really really old silk items and people making silk tapestries in the traditional way. unfortunately they didn't allow pictures. these machines were incredible and absurd at the same time: they were constructed entirely of bamboo and looked like one of those crazy contraptions found in da vinci's sketchbooks. one person sat at the bottom doing the actual weaving, while the other person was perched on top of the machine carefully pulling the different threads of silk to ensure the correct pattern. it was nuts.

then we went to the north temple (北寺 塔), which has the tallest pagoda south of the yangtze river. we climbed all the way up and got some pretty awesome views of suzhou, which is a huge city (as it turns out the population is close to 5 million!)

me standing in front of the north temple pagoda

view of suzhou from the top of the north temple pagoda

and then wandered around the garden, which had some trees that were actually blooming with flowers, more rock formations, a small lake with jumping fish, and a small island in the middle of the lake with a gazebo. adam and i enjoyed a nice cup of 绿茶, green tea, in the garden. then we made a quick stop for dumplings ( or dumps as we've begun to refer to them as colloquially) before cabbing back to the train station in order to get back to shanghai in time to celebrate st. patrick's day!

cultural wednesdays: duck tongue

instead of taking the introduction to chinese culture class offered on wednesdays, last week adam and i decided to initiate Cultural Wednesdays: every wednesday we will explore a part of shanghai that we haven't yet seen and introduce ourselves to chinese culture our own way! unfortunately this week's cultural wednesday had to be replaced by homework wednesday (waaahhh waaaahhhh) but we will resume our cultural education next week. last wednesday adam, anna, and i rode our bikes to the metro and took a train down to Xintiandi to get dim sum. although the crystal jade restaurant was listed under "cheap eats" in lonely planet, it definitely wasn't cheap by chinese standards. nonetheless, we began our day of culture with some delicious dim sum dumplings!

afterwards, we explored the rest of Xintiandi, which is mostly an expat shopping/eating hangout so there is not too much to see that you can't find in america (read coldstone creamery and coffee bean). but we found to a museum dedicated to the 1st National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

this museum was great...until the captions stopped being in english when we wandered into a wing devoted to Zhou Enlai (1st premier of the PRC). we weren't allowed to take pictures either, but the museum was located inside of the actual location of the 1st national party congress, which took place on July 23, 1921, and is a refurbished shikumen (traditional shanghai architecture, which no longer exists, with the exception of this preserved area). the museum had relics and artifacts of chinese history dating from mid-1800s and the opium wars up to the communist revolution in 1949. there were pictures of the founding members of the communist party in china and life size models replicating the seating arrangement of the NPC where the Chinese Communist Party laid out its manifesto and goals.

then we walked to old town to check out the antique market. this antique market is really amazing! there are seemingly endless alleys with stalls packed in like sardines selling all

sorts of interesting items. we had all become frustrated with the oppressively empty whiteness of the walls in our dorms rooms and wanted to spice things up with some cool chinese things, such as communist propaganda posters, old tapestry scrolls with chinese calligraphy or

landscapes painted on them, and lanterns. i bought a really great propaganda poster that i think says "long live mao zedong" on the bottom, if i translated correctly, which i probably

didnt. i'm hoping this poster can survive the trip back to america where it can join my soviet

propaganda posters in decorating the walls of my next room. i also bargained for a really cool, colorful tapestry thing with a buddha on it. we bought all sorts of other "antique" and "real" jade knick knacks, although we had a sneaking suspicion that all of these antique items were mass produced in a big factory in china and made to look really old because every stall pretty much offered the same deal.

after spending waayyy more time than we expected in the antique market, we realized the propaganda poster art museum was already closed (but we already saw plenty of communist propaganda at the site of the NPC and bought lots of poster art at the antique market) and

would have to be postponed until the next cultural wednesday. we had dinner plans to meet up with some chinese friends that adam and i met in a clothing store near our dorm in about an

hour and a half, which didnt give us enough time to explore any other parts of shanghai, so we decided to stay local and check out the flower and animal market.

on our way there we wandered through a park that had really funny, brightly colored "exercise" equipment and lots of older chinese men working out. this is the 2nd park i've encountered

with colorful exercise equipment, so i figure every park has them....i guess it's how chinese people all stay so thin, despite the obscenely greasy food!

sorry i don't know how to turn it, but that's adam

as it turns out there were a lot more animals than flowers and plants in this market, and we soon became overwhelmed by the squawking, barking, meowing, etc...of cats, dogs, birds, crickets, turtles, fish and snakes. by the time we conversed in chinese with a chinese parrot and wandered past crates of chickens that would mostly likely be someone's dinner, the looming

threat of bird flu sent us running out and dousing ourselves in hand sanitizer!

farm fresh H5N1 al forno anyone?

we met our chinese friends, silvia and yuan shi (that's them in the picture), at a restaurant called bao luo, which is apparently really popular with locals but little known by non-chinese. our initial plan was to speak only chinese at dinner, but it fell apart pretty quickly as their english is significantly better than our chinese and it would have made for a pretty silent meal.

we were determined to have a real cultural experience and therefore let them do all the ordering. this was definitely a chinese banquet, reminiscent of those in movies, where the dishes just kept coming and coming. the highlights of the meal for me (the delicious and the exotic) were: the shrimp served with a vinegar (cu) sauce, a pork and bok choy tower filled with bamboo shoots, the most delicious baozi of my life, and of course DUCK TONGUE!!!!

actually i didn't like the duck tongue at all....but i had to try it; it was a big basket filled with chilies and duck tongue, which are shaped kind of like the letter "Y" (maybe they're split like snake tongues...i don't know i've never looked inside of a duck's mouth before), there was some sort of very hard tendon/bone thing which comprised the bulk of the tongue and then a small quantity of extremely fatty meat around the tendon-thing. overall duck tongue is pretty unrewarding - i'd rather have a whole breast deep-fried in those chilies! but hey, when in china..........

the end of our meal

anna and i unfortunately had to leave the feast a little early, which i'm sure is incredibly rude to do, in order to make it back to campus in time for the taijiquan (aka tai chi) class we wanted to check out. after taking the extra loooooonnnnnnng way and getting very lost we arrived about 30 minutes late and attempted to do taijiquan. we all decided it was a little too slow for our liking, which probably means we don't have the patience or qi or harmony or whatever it takes to be taijiquan masters. i'll stick to my neon green t-shirt of pandas doing the 24 poses of taijiquan instead.

the REAL asian ghetto (kudos to chris for being far more clever than i)

i thought it'd be a good idea for a blog entry to go through what an average day is like. it's a little difficult to do this, because we have so little actual class, which means lots of empty days that we can devote to sightseeing, etc....so most days are pretty different. but i'll try to give you guys an idea of what goes on every day.

every day begins with some women yelling in korean in my floor. i think they might be the cleaning staff, but im not really sure. nonetheless, i generally wake up to them before my alarm goes off.  pretty much all of my friends in the program have bought bikes now, which means they ride to class, while i have to walk. i've been pretty resistant about getting a bike,

 but i think i'll probably cave and buy one today. the funny thing about people who ride bikes in shanghai is that pretty much every other bike will have someone sitting on the back riding side saddle. since i dont have a bike, i've been doing the shanghai thing and riding side saddle on my friend adam's bike to get to class. it's like a scene straight out of the movie pleasantville, except for the entire supporting cast is chinese not waspy.

we generally stop on our way to class to get baozi, which are 

steamed buns stuffed with meat or vegetables (you can even get dog meat....if you go to the right places!!). they cost 1kuai (approx. $0.12USD) per baozi and are the best breakfast snack ever!!!  the chinese really don't value breakfast as a very important meal and dont serve very tasty things for breakfast.

our baozi place

baozi

then we go to class and sit through hours of pretty boring lecture. 

luckily the way classes work at fudan unversity helps break up the monotony of 3 hour long lectures.  classes are divided into 2 or 3 45-minute segments with 15-minute breaks in between each segment. most of our classes are in teaching building 2, which has the most uncomfortable, awkward desks ever and the squat/trough toilets.  this is the Guanghua building, which is brand new and wayyy nicer than the other one (especially the bathrooms!!). but right now i only have my history class here, but come april when we have our 6 hours a day of chinese political economic reform, i may not like this building so much.

after class we'll often head to the pedestrian alley near campus aka the real asian ghetto (it's an alley full of cheap chinese food...so not quite the variety of cheap asian food that the berkeley asian ghetto has...some italian food that may or may not rival gypsies...i actually have yet to try it...and a few things that are seriously lacking in the berkeley asian ghetto: delicious, cheap street food and bootleg dvd stores!!!!!  

if we don't end up in the asian ghetto, i usually go to ciao cafe to get lunch, lattes that get 

cheaper with additional purchases, and spend a few hours studying....but mostly taking advantage of their free wifi and going online with my ipod...which might be the coolest thing ever! the

 people at ciao cafe are really sweet and make me a vegetarian pasta, even though it's not on the menu and speak pretty good english.  ohhh and they deliver!!!

Ciao Cafe

we generally finish up our day at a restaurant across the street from our dorms that we have decided to call "chili's" because we cant read the name in chinese and they have a red sign. we go there sooo often that they actually laugh at us when we walk in.  but they have pretty good food for under 10kuai (which is a little more than $1USD; as requested by my mom: you can all go to www.xe.com for currency conversions).  and we dont order family style at chili's...they

 have convenient single person dishes, which means i can stick to ordering vegetarian (whereas when we eat family style--i eat meat since that's mostly what we order).  luckily our most recent meal was less than satisfying for pretty much everyone and now that we all have bikes, it will greatly expand our dining options. (i started writing this entry this morning before i finally did go out and buy a bike.  i feel stupid for being so reluctant before....having a bike makes my life infinitely better!! but it's also one of the most ridiculous bikes ever.....in shanghai, they are really into these bikes with really small wheels. i think they look absurd, but they lady selling used, and probably stolen, bikes on the street in front of chili's insisted i have on with tiny wheels because i was the smallest person out of my friends buying bikes!!!)  and then after dinner we usually come back and watch a bootleg dvd or 2 before going to bed. (the picture that is hopefully to the right is of my friends bao and adam, from left to right, in front of chili's)

how do you feel about the squat toilet?

i have now had my first full week of classes and will be starting my 2nd week tomorrow.  (no classes on mondays --> 3 days weekends!!!) My final schedule ( i think) will be: Chinese Economic Reform & Development: Social and Political Implications, Marketing Management in China, China: From Reform to Revolution, Dynamics of the Chinese Economy, and Intermediate Chinese.  I am really excited about the 1st class, which is pretty much what I 

had decided to concentrate in for PEIS back at berkeley, but the professor is at a conference until April.  therefore the class doesnt start until april, which is cool for now because it gives us 3.5 day weekends (until tuesday evening when i have chinese), but when the professor returns in april we will have that class from 8-4pm every tuesday....6 45 minute intervals with 15 minute breaks in between....to make up for lost time!!!!! I was pleasantly surprised by the marketing class....because marketing isnt really my bag and i wasnt planning on taking that one. but the professor speaks really good english and the material is actually really interesting! i'm a little worried about the econ class because the professor's english is not very good, she's never taught in english before, and the 1st class was possibily the 3 most boring hours of my life!!!  but hopefully it picks up because the material is incredibly relevant to my major. finally, the history class (china from reform to revolution) seems awesome!! im really happy that there is a history class being offered because it means i dont have to take finance (yay!!!). hopefully classes this week will be a little more interesting....1st week of classes is always a little tedious anyway.

  i attempted to buy the textbook for my chinese class by following the very rudimentary map my chinese teach drew on the board of where to find the store, luckily picking the right store (based off of the characters i copied down in my notebook), and then showed the name of the book, written in chinese, to the clerk, who then brought us the books.  the books looked exactly like what the teach had shown in class...so we bought them even though they were non-returnable.  thinking we had very successful book-buying trip, we brought out our books in class to show everyone....only to discover that we bought the wrong level (we bought part 2 apparently!) oh dang dang! (holla meghan)

 i will have to ALWAYS remember to use the bathroom before class because the bathrooms in our classrooms are basically a bunch of stalls all built over a TROUGH that we are supposed to pee into. it's the most disgusting thing ever and i will never go back!

now that classes have started, i feel like i am quasi in school again, although i still have pretty much no homework so speak of.  despite the lack of work, it hasnt stopped me from visiting our new favorite place, Ciao Cafe, everyday! this cafe makes me feel like i am back 

at fsm (if only the tables were collaged with newspaper clippings from the free speech movement.....but i'm pretty sure Big Brother in beijing would not allow that!) they have delicious pizza, pastas, coffee, and FREE wifi.  and after you buy your 1st espresso drink for 15rmb....every drinkafter that is only 5rmb!!!! (btw there is also no tipping in china) my entire group of friends has essentially moved into ciao and we spend copious amounts of time there (today i was there from about 1:30 until 6:30......). next time i go i'll take a picture for the blog!

last weekend we explored some more clubs and found some awesome techno spots!!! thursday night we went to babyface and then on friday we went to G+! at G+ they periodically 

rained confetti or bubbles or soap (that looked like snow) onto the dance floor!

confetti!!!

to recover from all the clubbing we've also stayed in and watched a bunch of the bootleg dvds we've bought: darjeeling limited, american gangster, and season 3 of the office!

the weather is finally warming up a little so yesterday i went sightseeing on the bund with adam, storme (from south africa!!), and victor (from ecuador).  we walked pretty much the

 entire 1 mile stretch along the huangpu river, known as the bund. 

view of pudong from the bund

i got some pretty nice pictures of the shanghai skyline, even though the air quality was pretty horrible. after walking along the river, we came back up the other side of the street where there are a bunch of pretty old buildings (from the 1800s) that were mostly banking buildings from the days when shanghai was a big trading post.  we visited the headquarters of shanghai people's daily (the english language newspaper) which was having a photo exhibition of pictures taken of shanghai from 1985-1995, which was really cool. 

the bund

Most of the older buildings in the photographs are gone and there are about a million new, taller ones in their place!  according to the walking tour we were following in our lonely planet guide you are supposed to be able to go into most of these buildings, however we found most of them to be locked up. we did get to go into one building which is now home to a dolce & gabbana store, the dolce & gabbana martini bar, and 2 of the fanciest restaurants i have ever been into!!

after that, we tried to take a cab across the river to pudong, where all the tall buildings

 are (the picture to the right is of the tall buildings), so we could go up to the top of the Jinmao tower, which is currently the tallest building in china (maybe the world). but not for long as they are building one that will be even taller right next to it! but our cab driver was slightly insane and made u-turns up and down the same street and then go stuck in traffic (on the same 

street!!!!!) for about 15 minutes, so we got out without paying and took the metro across!  pudong is nothing like the western part of shanghai! it's extremely clean, with very wide, streets, and ostentatiously tall skyscrapers!! it apparently costs 100rmb to go up to the observation deck of the jinmao tower, which is on the 88th floor (top floor) so we decided to go up to the 87th floor for free, and go to the cloud 9 bar, part of the grand hyatt hotel. we were seated at a table by a window and had the most astonishing views (although slightly obstructed due to air pollution) of shanghai while we sipped over-priced cocktails and cappuccinos, watched the sun set and read Shanghai People's Daily. (picture of the sunset is hopefully to the left!) my roommate ara took me out for korean food after and it was amazing!!! she is pretty much the coolest person ever!

the itinerary for this week includes checking out one of the many ladies night events at pretty much every club in shanghai (some of them include free drinks, food, massages, and manicures!!!) and possibly taking a weekend trip to nearby suzhou, which is a water city and full of canals and gardens!!!