Today was the last "free" day of touring Shanghai. The Program set it up as a scavenger hunt, giving points for visiting certain locations and seeing certain Shanghai novelties. This was a really good way to get us to use the subway system and bus system (and our feet). One guy on our team has a brother living in Shanghai (starting a retail business manufacturing retail in China) so we stopped by his office in the morning. It turned out to help alot, he scribbled out a map of the subway system for us and marked most of the targets on our hunt. It was fun, but we lost energy about 2pm when we stopped in a park to eat a watermelon that we had bought from a street vendor. This park (People's Square) was actually the most impressive site, sitting right in the middle of urban Shanghai with trees, grass, ponds, etc with really good views of the skyline.

Tomorrow classes start and I'm really excited to start intensely studying the language, now that I have all of my time to devote to it. The campus entrance is about 200 feet from my host-family's apartment, which will be really nice since classdays will end on campus and I can just walk home. I went around the campus alittle bit today with some guys who were going to play tennis and run- really just looking to meet some Chinese and practice talking. Also, every Thursday is "english corner" at the college, where people from Shanghai come to campus (and meet under the huge statue of Mao) the practice their english skills on Americans/English speakers who are in the city. Alot of people from the program are planning on doing it, looking at the possibility of meeting (female) language partners to tutor in English and to be tutored in Chinese. Should be interesting...

I also learned how to really cross the street today, and thought I was going to be killed. On the way to campus with Alec and Jeff we decided to be bold and cross the street without using the crosswalk (well, bold in the sense that we just followed an old chinese guy as he crossed). The street was six lanes wide, and we got stuck standing on the center line with cars passing on each side for about 30 seconds. Normally you'd think cars would give you space, but they are too concerned about where they are going and how slow the other cars are moving than the people standing in the middle of the road. We darted across the last three lanes (behind our chinese friend) to get to safety. He laughed, probably thinking about how timid Americans are. Just another day for him, but it was exciting for us. We'll se if we ever try that again.