i've also created a web photo album

because it takes forever to load pictures onto the blog...i made a separate album on picasa.  i messed up loading this album....so some of them are duplicated.  i'll try and insert a few pictures into the blog to break up the text though.

http://picasaweb.google.com/nbrooks09/ThePicturesThatShouldBeOnMyBlog?authkey=ChDJ7CWvCEg

i fail at being veggie

and at all of my other attempts to be a conscientious consumer. i've been eating meat since the 3rd day here. it was just wayyyyy more effort than i really wanted to expend trying to not eat meat. and i would miss out on all the bomb food. i held out on my boycott of coke products a little longer.....until thursday, when i had a coke at lunch.  oh dang.  the pictures from our day tour of shanghai last thursday. 

yu yuan gardens

dragon wars!!!!

this is in old town...kind of touristy area...but very cool

ok...so blogger officially sucks....and it is impossible for me to load pictures.....which is why its taken me 3 days to write this stupid entry!! so now i am making a separate picasa web album for pictures and the blog will be mostly text.

some people from our group took a trip to a lake this weekend....but me and 2 friends, adam and arek stayed behind to explore shanghai a little more. on sunday we attempted to go to this big open air bazaar called the Xiangyang Market (which is in the french concession), where there is supposed to be great knock-off shopping!  well lonely planet has failed us once again....and apparently this market shutdown in 2006, so when we got there it was just a huge construction zone!!!!! (ahhhhhhhh!!! im ready to burn my lonely planet and use it for heat, which i think would be a much more effective use for it!) anyway...we were starving and wandered around for awhile.  this part of shanghai is really nice and there were a lot of expensive boutiques...sort of like the SoHo of Shanghai.  we eventually went into an italian restaurant and had a really delicious meal of bruschetta, fried calamari, and sandwiches...a nice break from the constant adventure of getting chinese food.  after that we went to this area called Xintiandi, which has all of these old style shanghai architecture buildings called Shikumen, which have all been renovated and are being used as restaurants and bars. it's a pretty ritzy area...kind of reminiscent of 3rd street promenade and the grove.  it was getting pretty cold and late at this point and we were about to go back to the dorms, when we opted at the last minute to go to the Bund instead.  the Bund is about a mile long area that runs along the west side of the huangpu river, which divides shanghai into the east and west parts. when you see pictures of the skyline if shanghai....its always a picture of Pudong (the east part) taken from the bund.  all of the huge skyscrapers that are in pudong were ALL built in the last 15 years or so.  before 1994 pudong was completely agricultural land. anyway.....we were approached by some chinese people who spoke english and just wanted to chat.  it's really easy to meet locals here...because they just come up and talk to us because we're white.  they are always really impressed when they see i can "speak" chinese.  even though i know i'm horrible and mispronouncing everything....they are always really nice and tell me how good my chinese is. they are usually just shocked that white people even try to learn chinese.  these people were really nice and really really funny!  they invited us to go tea tasting with them and sicne we had nothing to do....we went.  this was one of the coolest things we have done in shanghai so far!!! we tasted 6 kinds of tea...and learned all about tea history and tea customs (luckily our chinese friends translated for us).  we spent 2 hours drinking tea....and all bought some at the end!! we got really cool, fancy, chinese boxes to put it in!! and now i have pretty much a lifetime supply of jasmine tea...if anybody wants some!

on monday we went to old town, which we already visited on our organized tour of shanghai, but we didnt get to see much.  we did the walking tour outlined in our lonely planet guide. we wandered through narrow chinese alleys, visited a temple, saw this old wall that was built in 1553 and used as a fortress to protect shanghai from invaders, and did a little souvenir shopping.  the weather was pretty miserable though....it was freezing and rained all day!! when does it get warm in this city????  then we made our 2nd attempt to go bargain shopping. we went to pudong to this HUUUUUUUUGGGEEEEE market that was under the science and technology museum.  it was nuts!! just endless stores selling knock-off bags, watches, shoes, jackets, sunglasses, etc!!! i bought a silk robe, a mao messenger bag, a t-shirt with pandas doing the 24 different taichi poses, neon green shoelaces (so i can be as cool as serena), a fake chloe wallet, a pair of shoes, and DVDS: season 3 of the office, harry potter and the order of the phoenix, the devil wears prada, and the prestige!!!

well....thats all for now. i'm about to go meet my chinese teacher from berkeley, who is now a grad student at fudan university, for some tea! and i have my first class today: chinese!!!

happy lantern festival

i am finally attempting to do something with this blog. china won't allow me to view it, so i have noo idea what anything looks like.....so hopefully it works.

so far i am loving  shanghai!!! so after wandering all over campus on tuesday trying to figure out how/where to register, we were all pretty down to go out and explore downtown

 shanghai. the bund is supposed to be awesome, so we split up into 4 cabs to get there (it's kind of like freshmen year again...going out in huge groups).  of course all of the cabs get split up, mine ended up about 3 miles away from the bund, and of course none of us had cell 

phones yet.  we found some nice europeans who spoke english and good chinese to tell our next cab exactly how to get to the bund.  (this is a picture of Pudong....where all the really tall

 building are, taken from the bund. pudong 

is across the river--i have no idea where this picture is showing up)

at this point, assuming meeting up 

with everyone else was a lost cause we decided to wander around Nanxing Lu (Nanxing Rd) and find somewhere to eat. after about 5 minutes we ran into half of group (miraculously) on the

 street.  we had dinner at a ramen house and somehow the other people we were missing found us at the ramen place (we are AWESOME!!!)

after dinner we wandered around looking for bars...but apparently there arent any on this street (it was all shopping) so we just grabbed

 beers from convenience stores and hung out in a

 huge group on the street (because like every other country than america you can drink in the street and it's o

k....america is a stupid country as the chinese guy at walmart informed me of)

this is a quasi-group shot. because we live in international dorms there are people from all

 over...so we've been hanging out with people from sweden, ecuador, and south africa!!! the guy from south africa's name is storme...which is awesome!! the street wandering was fun for getting know my new friends...but definitely a failed attempt to find nightlife!

getting settled in the dorms was kind of an adventure, but now it's all good. even though my roommate is korean and doesnt speak much english, she is really really nice.  and her english is definitely better than my chinese, so we have some pretty comical conversations in chinglish. but she is pretty excited to have an american roommate so she can practice her english. her name is Ara and she is adorable!!

on wednesday we finally had some orientations and i definitely feel a lot more oriented. we got a really useful welcome packet with an awesome map of shanghai. we went to walmart to get cellphones (i will never reveal how many times i've been to walmart in the past few days...it's way too embarrassing!!!) because this program is in english, chinese wasnt required, so actually most of the other kids don't know much chinese. in fact, i am one of the best chinese speakers among my friends, which is really surprising. i successfully communicated with the walmart

 people and got me and a few other people cell phones!!! walmart is soo crazy here! i've never been to one in america, but i imagine the american ones dont have a fish market or sell dumplings!!!

wednesday night was our 2nd attempt at going out...and was markedly more successful!! first we went to have dinner in the french concession part of downtown (downtown is about a 25

 minute cab ride from our dorms...approx 30-50RMB depending on how much we get ripped off, which translates into about $8-9USD). dinner was awesome and they had pinyin pronunciations and english descriptions on the menu (it was a kind of classy place) which made ordering much less of the adventure it is when we just point and hope it's not chicken feet! in fact, buying everything here is an adventure...even toilet paper, which you need to buy and carry around with you because most bathrooms don't!)

according to our 2007 editions of the lonely planet shanghai guide, there were supposed to be a gang of bars on the same street as our restaurant about a 15 minute walk away.  lonely planet needs to be updated, because all of the bars that used to be on the right side of the street had been replaced by a big wall. we walked into a bar called Manhattan Bar, which was blasting ACDC. the only other patrons were older chinese men who were being entertained by much younger cuter girls, who we could only assume were being compensated for their "services".  after paying way too much for our drinks, we left to meet up with the foreign kids at this club called windows. (somewhere there should be a picture of my friend bao arguing with the xiaojie (waitress) over how small his drink was). 

on thursday we had an all day tour of the shanghai. we got charter buses and went to the YuYuan garden and old town shanghai (which our tour guide called the chinatown of chinatown), the shanghai museum, the center for urban planning and had a river cruise on the huangpu river, which cuts shanghai in half, separating the east and west sides. after that we talked the tour bus into taking us back to the garden so we could see the festivities for the lantern festival instead of going back to the dorms.  the lantern festival marks the end of chinese new year and people light up lots of lanterns and there were fireworks ALL over the city!!!!!!!  we were pretty beat after the long day, so we decided not to go out and get massages instead! it was 65RMB for an 80 minute foot massage....which includes free tea and they massage waayyyy more than just feet: neck, shoulders, back, and the whole leg.  so converted into USD it was definitely the best $9 i've ever spent. 

i'm having a difficult time with the pictures, so im just gonna make a post after this one with the pictures from the tour of shanghai.

I'm (FINALLY) going to Shanghai!!

So tomorrow i FINALLY fly west to the far east! my flight takes off at 10am tomorrow morning and i land in shanghai at 545pm tomorrow night...when i will hopefully remember enough chinese to get a cab to my dorm. i'll spend my first night without blankets, pillows, etc because i'm buying it all there. and hopefully things will come together on tuesday and i'll eat lots of dumplings and hopefully they won't make me sick.  and hopefully this trip will be awesome....i'll do my best to keep this updated with lots of pictures etc...