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.