Reflections on Shanghai

I am finally back from my midterm trip to shanghai. I am anxious to share my experience.

We traveled down to shanghai on a “hard sleeper train.” In this sort of train, there are a bunch of beds in a train car, so you can sleep on the way down. It was a long train ride and fairly uncomfortable.

We stayed in a really nice hotel during our first couple of nights in shanghai. We went to a museum and explored the city for a couple of days. Shanghai is a beautiful city with an international flavor to it. There are plenty of foreign restaurants, stores, and architecture.

On my birthday, I and some of my friends went for Thai food. I’m 20 now! It feels a little weird not being a teenager anymore.

We then traveled to a lot of little cities around shanghai like Ningbo and moganshan. We did a lot of group activities there like hiking. We also ate most of our meals together. They were all family style, which I grew to dislike. Someone (usually the teacher) would order a bunch of dishes. They would then be placed on a spinning mechanism on the table. When you want a dish, you have to rotate it towards you.

We ate a lot of weird dishes like pigeon, a foul-smelling tofu, and bamboo. The few good dishes that we had were rapidly gobbled up by everyone. The result was that I (and many others) never got full from the meals. I don’t like the idea of somebody else ordering food for me. I am excited to be able to order my own dishes from now on.

I had a lot of interesting experiences as well too. I rode a three hour boat to get back to Shanghai from one of the cities we were staying in. I visited an island with a Buddhist monastery. It was neat to see all of the temples and statues. Many Chinese visit every day. My teacher informed me that they do so less out of religiosity than they do out of respect for tradition, and a belief that it brings good luck.

Back in Beijing I have a 12 page paper to work on, and I will start classes again on Monday.