For now, I'll start with the here and now. Here is Jiading, Shanghai, where I'm currently living in the PanYuan hotel next to the Shanghai University campus in Jiading. I'm about 2 hours outside of Shanghai by metro, which I think is the fastest way to get there (definitely the cheapest). I just got back from class where I learned about teaching to different learning styles. Yesterday I taught my first class on Storytelling--I played getting to know you bingo (thanks Jim) and Mad Libs to make some funny stories for the class, and we all practiced reading aloud and learned some new vocabulary. Each day I take a chinese class for an hour and a half. The class focuses on spoken chinese and identifying the words that people are saying (in other words, not being completely overwhelmed when someone says any sentence longer than 5 words). It's working pretty well to activate my buried chinese, and I feel better and better about talking to people on the street each day. I stay here in Shanghai for a little over one more week and then fly to Chengdu where my actual work starts.
I left Colorado about two weeks ago now. I packed up all of my most important possessions (mainly shoes), said goodbye to my family and friends in Crested Butte and the Front Range, and flew to Seattle for a couple days to visit the horde of friends I have who live there. I managed to see almost everyone on my list, and ended up spending a lot of time with Jeremy and Jon. From there, Matt and I drove up to Vancouver on a bus to catch a flight to San Francisco, then to Shanghai. Immigration came within minutes of making me miss my flight for a reason they wouldn't tell me (they made me wait in their back room for a while, then I got questioned for a while, then they scanned my bags, then I ran to catch my flight). It gave me a scare that I was in trouble for something I hadn't done, and gave Matt a scare that he'd be on his way to China without me. In the end, my bags caught another flight to SFO and met me in Shanghai when I got here. The flight from SFO to Shanghai was really long, but because it was east to west the sun stayed in basically the same spot in the sky the whole time so it felt as if I was suspended. The airplane didn't have personal entertainment systems so I read for most of the flight and slept a little. Bryce and FP Magazine both recommended the Game of Thrones series, which kept me pretty enthralled for the whole flight. After that, I arrived at the airport, met up with the rest of the group, drove back to our hotel, went out to dinner, and collapsed onto the rock hard beds here (but I camped all summer, so it felt like home).
I did lots of exploring in the first couple of days, and became pretty familiar with where to get food, where to go hang out, where the supermarket is, where the best tea is, etc. I have a cell phone (which you can call from skype). The number is One five two two eighteen sixteen four one seven. Now I have a place that I go to every morning for vegetable buns, and another place for something that Matt and I call "chinese breakfast burritos" and "chinese egg mcmuffins." I've gotten pretty good at ordering food now (the first couple days, and still to some degree the game plan was to find a picture and point at it, or point at something someone else had in the restaurant). One night a few of us met up and went into downtown Shanghai to see the Bund at night and to go to a tea shop in the French Concession. It was a fun trip, and we stayed a little too long--the subway had shut down 15 minutes before we got to our last connection. We had to take a taxi home which was about an hour and 15 minutes and ended up costing about $5 each.
I'll leave it there for now, but expect more posts soon with some pictures.
Luck
