At last, I have sat down to write about my trip to Yunnan Province. Alec and I spent 9 days traveling, stretching our trip from the day after classes ended until the day before they restarted (上课！）. It was an amazing trip, and we were able to experience many different parts of China in four cities that were nothing like Shanghai. I have broken the trip into a daily diary.

Saturday, July 15

I spent the previous night in Alec's apartment, so we would be able to wake up early and buy some last minute items (that turned out to be very valuable) and then head to the airport. We walked a ways down Xuanhua Lu to nice outdoor store, where we bought some 'just in case' items such as matches, hats, and rain ponchos. I decided that cotton probably wasn't the best idea to wear while hiking several hours each day in Tiger Leaping Gorge, so I bought a breathable shirt and some pants that easily convert to shorts. After this we were off to the airport, crossing our fingers that the Chinese online travel booking service we used (C Trip) worked.

One of the girls who works at the front desk of Alec's apartment coplex noticed that we were definitely going somewhere, and helped us to call a cab and told the driver which gate to drop us off at Hongqiao Airport. At the airport, we found the C-Trip desk, paid 6,000 RMB for our tickets, and checked in to our flight. The process was really easy, security is similar to the States (only sometimes the people watching the baggage scanner get distracted for a few minutes). At Hongqiao, not all airplanes pull up to the terminal- when our flight was called we got on a bus and drove to our plane sitting on the tarmac, where we sat in the plane for an hour due to 'air traffic'. One local Chinese created a commotion and began yelling at the flight attendants when the pilot turned off the air conditioning, which turned out to be a good thing sine it was about 95 degress outside. Flight service on Chinese airlines is eccellent. Our flight was 3 hours long, during which we were served drinks twice and a hot chicken and rice dinner.

Arriving at Kunming, we attempted to get on an overnight sleeper bus to Lijiang, but it was full. No big deal, we checked into a hotel, 75 RMB for a room that had two beds and a bathroom with a western toilet and a huge cockroach in the bathroom. That night we walked around Kunming, finding two really cool local markets and tons of street vendors. According to our Lonely Planet travel guide (which was effectively the third member on our trip), Yunnan is famous for their noodle dishes so we order some some that came out boiling in a charred ceramic bowl.


Sunday, July 16

We woke up early in Kunming, went to the bus station, and caught our eight hour bus to Lijiang. On the bus we took turns napping most of the way, waking each other up when the scenery was good. Missing the overnight sleeper bus was decidedly a good thing, because we were able to both explore Kunming and as well as see some really cool rural villages and scenery on the way to Lijiang. Another American was on the bus with us, also studying chinese in Beijing and going to Lijiang to study Kung Fu.

In Lijiang we got a cab with him to the Old Town, a big area with cobblestone roads and a million tourist shops, where he showed us a guest house that he had stayed in previously. This was a very a nice place, and even a little cheaper than our room in Kunming. We spent the evening walking around and bought a couple pieces of fabric for our moms. There was a lot more we would have liked to buy, but we didn't have anywhere to put it. After eating dinner at a nice restaurant (Yak meat and rice) we promptly got lost in the maze of the city. The streets are also lined with bars, with girls dressed in traditional Naxi clothes singing with each other and the tourists. The buildings all have open facades, so opposing bars get into singing exchanges with each other. We spent the end of our evening in one of these bars, after most of the tourists had left. It was really fun sitting and talking to the girls in our broken chinese and singing once in awile with some other people in the bar across the street. When we got tired of "Yaso, Yaso, Yeah Yaso!" we broke into "We have spirit yes we do..." but they didn't quite get it. Again we turned in pretty early so we could wake up at 7am and catch our next bus to Qiaotao and start our hike. The pattern of staying every night in a different place was constant throughout the trip, and a very good way for us to see each city. Most of the cities we stayed in had one fairly small area for tourists and would have been boring after a day or two.


Monday, July 17

Monday morning was a bit hectic, as none of the Banks were accepting any foreign credit/debit cards. We ran into some other foreigners who were having the same problem, lucky for all of us we spoke enough chinese to explain the situation to the Bank of China employees and have them do cash advances manually. On this trip we ran into many foreigners travelling alone (and seemingly always in need of help); it's hard to understand why they decide to go to such a different country with literally no assistance outside their travel book. Crazy. But it was kind of fun helping them and practicing our chinese. The disfunctional Bank of China ATM in Lijiang led to us meeting three Europeans, two of whom (Phinda from Endgland and Jimmy from Sweden) we decided to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge with. The third was from Belgium, and heading to Zhongdian/Shangri La.

This bus ride went through more beautiful countryside of Yunnan. For most of the 3 hour trip I spoke in chinese with a young Korean couple, who had studied the language for a couple years north of Beijing and were nearly fluent. We arrived in Qiaotao at about 3pm, at the Gorged Tiger Cafe. This is the unofficial starting point of the hike into the Gorge, and is a good staging area run by a woman name Margo, an Australian woman who is a touch crazy. She was pretty harsh on a group of chinese girls who were planning to start the hike with us, mainly because they were wearing normal street clothes and not planning on taking any water. Alec and I knew one of the girls from the bus ride, so we convinced them to take water.

The first night we hiked about two hours into Naxi Village. The Yangze River was visible in this section of trail, before the river enters the deep Gorge. Local chinese men on horses followed us for most of the way, hoping that we would eventually be too tired to continue and have to rent a horse. Most of the way the trail went through a mixture of terraced corn fields and untouched brush. Several times we had to make room for locals hauling things along the trail. We chose to stay at the Lu Ye Guest House the first night. Another group of hikers stayed the night there as well- a group of friends from the Czech Republic. The house was amazing, with a really nice courtyard in the middle, nice rooms, good food, and showers and toilets. All of the work was done by a single worker, a girl who was probably about 16 or 17 years old. When we arrived she brought us each tea and cooked us dinner. That evening I walked around the house, which was surrounded by pig pens, chicken coups, and acres of terraced corn fields. This place turned out to be our favorite night of the trip, because the house was so relaxing and the girl was so nice to us and extremely hardworking.


Tuesday, July 18

Tuesday was our biggest hiking day, going six hours from Lu Ye to the end of the Gorge. The day started out cool, cloudy, and misty which made a good climate for the steepest part of the hike. Right away we were at the section called "24 bends" which was a series of about 40 traverses going up the side of a mountain. This took us away from the river a little bit, but we began to hear the rushing water as we neared the rapids of the Gorge. After descending a ways, the trail again began to wind through random villages of a dozen or so houses, where the families were either working in the fields, or starting at us as we walked by. Many of the people, especially the elders were really difficult to understand when they spoke due to the different dialects. By noon the clouds had all burned off and the weather was hot and sunny.

In July the weather changes several times each day in the Gorge. Just a couple hours later, while resting at the (ridiculously nice) Halfway Guest House we waited out a pretty big rainstorm. We decided to keep going once it let up; we had about three or four hours to go until we reached Walnut Garden. About an hour into this hike the rain began again, and didn't stop. Luckily Alec and I had purchased those rain ponchos in Shanghai (the best 5 kuai spent on the entire trip)...our upper bodies were completely dry from the rain even though it was 'cats and dogs'. Our two Europeans mates weren't so prepared (we helped them check their packs that were 'too big' at a guest house in Lijiang...along with all of the stuff that would have been handy in bad weather), they were drenched. We ended up missing the turn for Walnut Garden, and descended from the trail a bit early to Tina's Guest House. From here we waited out the rest of the storm and then walked up the road to Sean's Spring Guest House, which we had heard so much good about. We were not impressed- the building was in the middle of a big addition and we were the only guests. What the place did have going for it was pizza, which was surprisingly good.


Wednesday, July 19

Alec and I decided that we were done spending our time with our European friends, so we got up early, told them we were leaving, and hit the trail by ourselves. It was still a little drizzly in the morning, we were going to hike down to the river (but is too deep in the Gorge to see from the trail or road) and then decide what to do next. The trail we chose went through another group of corn fields, and then started into the heart of the Gorge. Undoubetedly we were the first ones on the trail that morning, as we constantly were walking through spider webs made the night before. This was the most intense part of our stay in the Gorge, the river was raging between vertical rock walls and the trail gradually descends to the water...but we didn't quite make it that far before turning back. We came to another waterfall crossing the trail, and emptying onto a solid, slick rock that resembled a waterslide. Alec and I were going to take some pictures as we did before of other waterfalls over the trail, but before we could we had a pretty big scare. With both of us standing in the falls, we heard the 'chink' 'chink' of falling rocks...and looked up to see three or four rocks coming right at us. We ran back to our bags and out of the way. The rocks were about the size of our heads, and could have knocked us down the slippery slide and into the Yangze about 100 feet below. I\At this time it was also raining steadily, so Alec went ahead to see what the trail looked like. It kept going along the shear cliffs and included some rickety wooden bridges. I thought I'd had enough excitement for the time being, so we turned back.

After making it back to the road, we returned to Tina's Guest House and decided to go down to the river on a shorter trail. This was only about 40 minutes from the river. A huge boulder extended out into the river, so we were able to look up and down the raging river. The sound made it necessary to yell in order to communicate, and reminded me of going into the generators at McNary Dam. To hike back up, we paid 10 Yuan to climb a ladder up the side of one of the cliffs. It was about 20 meters tall, and really intense. This entire hike was pretty much straight up and out of the Gorge; we ascended about 1,500 feet in 45 minutes.

Our next step was taking a cab back to Qiaotao and make a decision about where to go next. The cab ride was not necessarily relaxing, the road was just a bigger version of the trails that we had been hiking on for the past three days. Our vehicle was a van that looked like a Micromachine. We drove through waterfalls crossing the road (which was now our least favorite situation), and saw too many rockslides to count.

We made it. In Qiaotao we weren't quite sure what to do next, either go to Shangri Li La (Zhongdian) or back to Lijiang. Luckily we had the 'help' of a chinese girl who had forgotten her hat in the Gorged Tiger Cafe...we asked here were she was going, she said "Shangri Li La" (Zhongdian), we asked when the bus came, she said "It's here now", and then we said "Let's Go". And we did.

This bus trip went yet again through beautiful countryside, under the setting sun we saw the gradual change from Naxi farm villages to Tibetan farmland and villages. The biggest difference was the clothing that people wore, with bright pinks, greens, and yellows. In Zhongdian we checked into the Barley Guest House, right in the middle of the old part of town. Zhongdian was very similar to Lijiang and with the same type of tourist souvenir shops. At our guest house we determined where to go next- we saw a business card for the Migratory Bird Bar at Meili Snow Mountain in Deqin. We went to the bus station and bought tickets for the next day. For dinner we ate at the Tibet Cafe- Yak, Kung Pao Chicken, rice, and butter tea. After dinner I wrote my mom a (late) Happy Birthday email, and we hit the sack early.


Thursday, July 20

This was yet another exciting bus ride, across a mountain range with peaks taller than any in North America. The highest point on the road was a 4,300m pass (about 14,000 feet), and the road eventually became barely wide enough for our bus, which made passing big trucks interesting. Deqin was a really cool town, with far fewer tourists and surrounded by mountains. We spent the night at the Tibet Hotel, and walked the streets of the town in the evening. All three of these cities (Lijiang, Zhongdian, and Deqin) had central squares where locals did some traditional slow dance to music, similar to Tai Qi and assumedly for exercise. Thursday was primarily a travel day, and relatively uneventful.


Friday, July 21

Alec and I took an early morning cab to Fei Lai Si (a Tibetan temple with an amazing view of Meili Snow Mountain). This was undoubtedly my favorite town/village on the trip, with a clear view of the 22,000 ft mountain peaks and authentic restaurants and shops. We arrived around 10:00am and relaxed for about an hour in the Migratory Bird Bar, asking some locals about any trails around the area where we could spend a couple hours hiking. The bar had wood burning stoves keeping pots of green tea hot, and its walls were plastered with notes and photos from people who had spent time there. We decided to hike down to a river below the village. The trail started at a place where about 10 stupas were lined up, and covered in incense and brightly colored prayer flags. About an hour into the hike, the trail disappeared and we ended up turning back to village to try something else.

Our two choices were to take a taxi to the Meili Glacier, or to hang around the village and see the rest of Fei Lai Si. After talking to one of the cab drivers, we decided that the glacier was too far away, about a two hour drive each direction. So we decided to hike up to see the rest of the Temple. The Temple is spread out along three different hillsides surrounding the village. Our first trail went right across the hillside in front of the village (with the consecutive stupas), and the other two were located on the two hilltops behind the village. Getting up to them was easy, but seeing the first hill made it seem like a waste of time. On this hill was the biggest stupa of the Temple, but the area was littered with garbage and some sort of construction was going on. We didn't spend any time here, and continued onto the next hill. This was the highest hilltop, and actually there was no stupa, only prayer flags. The prayer flags were stretched between trees, and near the top of the hill is was hard to see anything else. Alec and I stopped at the top and relaxed for about one hour. I found a spot on the edge of a small cliff that had a clear view of the Meili Range and just sat looking way down into the valley below and rested.

We returned to the village, where we bought some stones carved by a local Tibetan man and his son on the side of the road. After walking around awhile longer we returned to the Bird Bar for dinner, where we met some Chinese Tourists that apparently were obsessed with foreigners. This is easy to pick out, especially when they start taking pictures of you our of nowhere. We spent some time talking to them, they all had tripods and gigantic cameras, taking pictures of the mountains every time a cloud moved. Alec went down to play soccer in the street with some local kids in hopes of speaking some more chinese, but they spoke some irrecognizable dialect. I stayed on the balcony with the chinese group, posed for some more pictures (primarily with some over excited girl who wanted to "travel around the world with a foreigner" - whatever that means). We returned to our guest house as it became dark, sent some emails, and fell asleep to the sound of a small animal running around in the attic above our room.

Saturday, July 22

We decided against taking the same bus back through the mountains to Zhongdian, and instead hired a taxi. It cost 400 Yuan and took 4 hours, but it was completely worth it. We had better views of the scenery, but the weather was overcast so we could not see the surrounding peaks as we did the day before. The cab ride varied from creeping through large herds of cattle and goats grazing on the road to racing through small villages at about 90 kmh with the horn blaring.

Back in Zhongdian we purchased tickets for the overnight bus to Kunming, and strolled through town one last time before the bus left. The sleeper bus is really a gamble on comfort. We were lucky and had window beds, but if you get stuck in the back, it is literally sardines- 5 people sleeping next to each other in beds about two feet wide. We managed to get almost the entire bus to be smoke free, except the driver refused to stop. Being next to a window was an advantage for two reasons, though- 1. We were able to stick our heads out for clean air, and 2. It was cold outside so we had some bargaining chips: "You tell the driver not to smoke and I'll close the window".


Sunday, July 23

We arrived in Kunming early in the morning, which wasn't good considering our plane didn't depart until 5pm. To kill time we went to a park and ate a peanut butter and granola breakfast, and then decided to go to the airport to try to change our plane tickets to an earlier time. No dice. Our next idea was to check into our flight at 1oam, but they wouldn't let us do that either. So we returned to Kunming, ate lunch, and searched for a place to get haircuts. On this trip we had the great idea of not bringing razors, so by Sunday our faces hurt and we looked pretty rough. We figure this would be another way to kill time, so we found a local barber and he cleaned us up a little bit with his clippers. It was fun.

Finally 3pm rolled around, so went checked into our flight and headed back to Shanghai. The trip was really interesting, and opened my eyes to what 'the rest of China' is like. We saw that even though Shanghai is completely different than home, it is still a world away from rural China.

Strangely the last two weeks have felt like the standard 'grind' of school, so I didn't feel like anything compelling had happened and thus I haven't posted recently. But, as I've been informed by my mom, I need to keep writing. And after getting the gears turning, there was alot to say:


AmCham
On July 3rd the American Chamber of Commerce held a big event celebrating Independence Day in Shanghai, for its local members (people doing business or working in China primarily) and anyone else who wanted to pay 350 Yuan to come. Students from the program were able to volunteer at this event, which meant free admission, and it turned out to be really fun. The event was held at the Cypress Hotel in the Hongqiao District, and I ended up being at the volunteer sign-in/ticket sales booth...which meant I was lucky enough be able to sit down for my entire three hour shift and talk to the three Chinese people working with me. This position also allowed me to keep track of some of our delinquent students who showed up to volunteer, got their free event ticket, and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking and eating. Oh well.

The event was put together really well. A local cover band played a whole bunch of 'classic' American/Western songs-Rolling Stones, CCR, U2, Led Zeppelin, etc-and did a surpisingly good job. Various Shanghainese western fast food places catered the event, so myself and a group of friends went around and ate: pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, kabobs, fish and chips, ice cream, and smoothies (yes, all of them). I was ridiculously full.

While we waited in the hour-long line for pizza, we started a conversation with a fellow American, who turned out to be an Alumni of the University of Washington Department of Mechanical Engineering. He did his PhD under Dr. Ashley Emery, who taught my thermodynamics course. Small world, eh? Now he is working in Shanghai for General Electric, apparently running the entire Research and Development operation in China consisting of about 1,100 PhDs and Masters Degree holders, all of who are Chinese. Of course our favorite question to ask Americans living in Shanghai is "Do you drive yourself in the city?"...his response (as with everyone else's) was "Are you crazy!".


Homestay
Last Saturday (10th) morning my "homestay brother" came home from school in Beijing. Originally I'd thought that he attended Peking University, but he actually goes to CUFE (Central University for Finance and Economics). His name is Sun Bingzuo- last name's are said first in China, so his 'name' as we know it is Bingzuo- and when he walked in the door he was wearing a University of Puget Sound T-shirt...where he has a friend studying. It was very similar to America, where the kid comes home from college and his parents cater to his every need- food, laundry, etc.

The first dinner with the entire family was definitely more lively than before with just myself and the parents. My mom (Huang Ming), who is considerably more quiet that my dad (Sun Li), evidently had a few things she wanted to know about me that she was waiting to ask 'through' Bingzuo. The first thing that came up was the oddity of me being left-handed (which also came up the night of my arrival in China in the Program Office when I signed some document...one of the other homestay moms commented that I must be very smart because I write with my left hand; I must be). Chinese children apparently are not allowed to write with their left hand, and Bingzuo told me that Huang Ming thinks I must be very clever. The next subject was my study habits, which apparently are good. Huang Ming thinks I study hard, I wanted to tell her that I would be out on the town everynight if their language wasn't so ridiculously hard to learn. I've also came to understand that my Chinese must sound horrible to native speakers, not only because of the new tones, but because sentences are constructed completely different. STPV for subject + time + place + verb (roughly). Talking like Yoda seems to be a good approximation.


Wild Animals!
On Sunday (11th) myself and four others went to the boonies east of Pudong to the Shanghai Wild Animal Park. We came across it in the Shanghai edition of Lonely Planet, which has been pretty much priceless on this trip. Getting to the park was kind of a trek, a subway ride to Shanghai Stadium and then a bus ride that turned out to be 2.5 hours long. We knew we were in for a long ride when, 30 minutes into the trip the bus driver told us that it was still 'early'. At least we didn't break down...well, really break down. Twice during the trip the engine stopped running, which was interesting. It must have been something easy to fix, because it only took the driver about 30 seconds to get it running again.

The park itself was in pretty good shape, and it had a ton of animals. Part was an animal sanctuary that we rode through in a tour bus and saw several (nearly) natural habitats. The rest of the park was an outdoor zoo. For the most part the animals were pretty active and had decent conditions (except the pandas, which were all inside sleeping on concrete).


Tiger Leaping Gorge
Next week we have no classes, and most of us are heading out to explore China in smaller groups. Most people are heading to Beijing, but some others have more adventuresome trips planned. Three friends are heading far west to Ulumuqi/Kashgar to explore the desert and see some the Silk Road ruins. I almost joined them, but it isn't a mandarin-speaking area and I didn't feel like spending a week looking up kazhak sentences in a phrasebook near the Afghanistan border. Another group is going to Tibet, which, in my opinion, will probably turn out to be one of the better trips for its scenery: they have planned a stay at the Tibetian Base Camp of Mt. Everest.

I am going with my friend Alec from Wake Forest to Yunnan Province, where we are planning to hike along the source of the Yanzi River through Tiger Leaping Gorge (there are lots of pictures online, and I will post my own when I return). The trail will take three to four days to go from Lijiang to Zhongtian, staying in hostels along the way. We have planned for nine days, but we have not figured out what we will be doing after the hike. Most likely we will just explore the old towns and surrounding areas. Lonely Planet has lots of ideas.

Deciding to go on this trip has created a conflict with something else that I really want to do while I am here, which is go to Hebei with a family friend-Lawrence Zhou-and visit his and my Uncle Florian's newest project. I originally planned on trying to make it up there (near Beijing) at the end of my program, but it looks like this probably won't work out anymore. It's hard to make decisions like this, when I obviously will never again be in this situation again, in China together with the friends I've made, and don't know exactly when I will be back to China to visit Hebei if I can't make it there in the last few weeks of the study program.


Time Winding Down
When I return from this trip to Yunnan, the clock is going to be ticking: only twenty days will be left in the program. I have a ton to do still, including buy a ton of things for the people back home. Also, I still need to go to campus on a Thursday evening for 'english corner' where chinese students studying english congregate around the enormous statue of Chairman Mao to speak with native english speakers. A friend of mine went recently, and said that 5 or 6 english speakers showed up and each was surrounded by two concetric rings of chinese students. Sounds fun, I can't wait to do it.

I already can't wait to come back to China. I will be looking into the study abroad options offered by the UW Business School to second year students, hopefully next year I will be able to come back. In the meantime I am going to attempt to continue studying Chinese at UW all of this coming school year.

Finally I've gotten around to putting up another post. The past week was pretty draining, starting Monday by getting off the train from Shaolin/Henan Province and going straight to the classroom, followed by a pretty intense week of school.

Shaolin

The entire group of students spent last weekend in Henan Province, seeing some historical/tourist places (The Shaolin Temple and its kungfu monks and the Longmen Grottos-thousands of hillside carvings of Buddha line both sides of the Yihe River). We left on Friday afternoon, taking a 14 hour train ride through the countryside to get to Zhenzhou ( a small town of 6 million people). The train ride was interesting, all 52 of us packed into a traincar full of bunkbeds, together with some local Chinese people. Watching out the window was pretty unreal, seeing trading posts where people bought food and sold their harvests, and seeing people in huge fields farming by hand, a few of which were still using mules as their main source of power.

The temple itself was pretty impressive some pictures are posted at students.washington.edu/matk/Shanghai), but it was very toursity. We went to a kung fu show, where about 20 aspiring monks performed their routine of acrobatics and pain tolerance-breaking things with various parts of their bodies. The temple complex itself was filled with many separate pagodas. The underside of all the roof overhangs were hand painted in bright blue and green. A few monks were milling around; but the 'real' monks don't practice kungfu anymore, because of the commercialization that has taken over. Our tour guide said that there are now some 50,000 kungfu students studying in Henan province, all of whose parents made the decision for them and enrolled them in school that will likely lead to a lifetime in kungfu...no free choice for those kids. We also took a stroll through the Pagoda Forest, where hundreds have been pagodas have been built honoring the past monks who have lived and died at Shaolin.

The best part of the whole trip was our trip up to the top of a mountain near the Temple. It took a little over an hour to get from bottom to top, most of us walked up (unfortunately we didn't keep track of how many stairs there were) and some took a gondola up. At the top was a nearly 360-degree view of the surrounding mountain range and the valleys below, but it was so hazy that the scenery just disappeared into the distance. The view made the hike more than worth the energy it took, it was actually kind of tough hiking weather-about 95 degrees and 80%humidity.


Last Week
It was the first full week of class, and it's going to turn out to be an intense program. Everyday there are two articles to read for the Shanghai History Course and about three hours of Language homework... Our professor is in the middle of writing a book about Shanghai nightlife in the 1930s, which is the time period our class is mainly going to focus on. It seems interesting enough, but I could never see myself focusing so intently on history. It seems more practical to get ready for what's going to happen in the future instead of what has already taken place. I guess that's why I didn't major in history.

The language homework is listening and character writing/memorization. I'm really glad I had a little head start on the language last quarter, it has helped a ton having seen so many characters and patterns before. I've started making a huge stack of flashcards, which reminds me of studying vocabulary words for the GRE and GMAT. Our first test was Friday, with an hour of oral exam and and hour of written. The orally is set up like an interrogation (which is probably normal in langauge courses, I just haven't taken a language class in so long that I've forgotten), with question-answer sections and dialogue readings from Chinese characters. The written was much simpler, and was written entirely in Chinese characters...good thing I've been studying and knew almost all of them.


Nighttime
This Friday and Saturday were the first times that I went out in the city, and it is definitely a little different than at home. Here, it just never stops. On friday night a big group of people from the program went to a club in the French Concession (an area of the city colonized by France, with big, gated buildings/homes and tree-lined streets). The club had an open bar for $99 kuai, and our group had a room/table reserved for the night. Inevitably the nights seem to break down into watching the World Cup, which is live in Shanghai at about midnight. The club was full of westerners, and as the Germany-Argentina match went into penalty kicks the people were well divided and yelling at each other. I left with a group of people at about 2am, which didn't seem to be approaching the club's closing time or last call. Most of Shanghai must still be awake at this time of night, as it took a little over an hour to hail a cab. The street was lined with annoyed people trying to stop cabs, all of which had people in them. An interest fact, supposedly Shanghai's taxi companies as a whole get about 10,000 calls an hour on average, and 200,000 calls an hour when it is raining. Wow.

Saturday I went with another group of people back to the French Concession to have some all-you-can-eat sushi. It was my second experience with sushi, and was a lot different than when I went with Nick in San Francisco. The place did not have seaweed/rice/fish rolls, just pieces of raw fish and some other meats. We ordered a lot of salmon, tuna, and macarel, a few dishes of eel, and raw beef, and to be adventuresome we tried a little raw horse meat. It was surprisingly good, and came in little frozen wafers of meat. We eventually wound up playing a game with Saki and beer, and then went to a bar on Nanjing Road to watch the World Cup. The bar didn't last too long, and I wound up going back home...where my homestay dad was watching the game too. I watched England lose to Portugal and tried to teach him the english words for the entire penalty kick situation, then went to sleep.

It was a good week.

It's been a few days since I've written anything; I've been traveling and doing schoolwork. I think I'm going to break this into two entries, because I had some things to put down even before we went west to Henan Province to see the Shaolin Temple and Longmen Grottos.

Last Thursday was the first day of classes, which will be MWF: 9-11am for the Uncovering Shanghai culture course (at the CIEE study center) followed by 1-4pm for Mandarin Chinese on campus at East China Normal University ("Normal" is the English translation for "teaching university"). Tuesday and Thursday we meet in the afternoon for the language class. The campus is really nice, with lots of trees, grass (and quiet!) aligning two central streams. Chinese classes are taught by future "chinese-as-a-second-langauge" teachers...I believe they are graduate students. All of the teachers are young chinese women, and are really nice and fun to talk with. My class was juggling a few of the teachers around for the first three days of class, but finally we have our permanent teachers assigned and I think they will be alot of fun for the next seven weeks. The teacher for my dictation section is Dong laoshi, and the smaller section is taught by Chang laoshi-laoshi refers to their status as teachers. The language class will supposedly be "no english" within the next week, which seems a little overwhelming so soon, but after a week in the homestay I'm getting better at understanding what is being said.

Last Thursday we went on a cruise of The Bund, which is the area directly across the Haungpu River from Pudong. Right before we got on the buses to get down there, we had to wait out a Shanghai thunderstorm, which was very impressive. At about dusk the wind kicked up to 35 mph, and the sky got almost black. Water came down in sheets for about 20 minutes, and I was lucky enough to be watching from my chinese tutor's dorm window. Waiting in the lobby later, we met some students from Washington DC who are living on the ECNU campus studying Chinese culture/history. The drive through Shanghai was pretty stunning, with huge lightning bolts streaking across the sky and lighting up most of the city. For dinner we took a break from Chinese food: Pizza Hut. Traffic didn't stop when we got on the water; we were in an antpile of barges and other random boats. A lot of the boats seemed to barely be making it, the engines were sputtering and their crews were huddled in tents on deck trying to get up/downriver. The city was lit up, and actually kind of looked like Vegas at night...all of the tall buildlings have pretty well designed lighting, and some were almost completely covered in neon.

I've posted some pictures, go to http://students.washington.edu/mkuffel/Shanghai.

Lastly, I cannot see comments that are written on blogspot.com, as apparently the Chinese Government has blocked the website (whatever the reason, blogspot.com doesn't load in China). I can edit, but just cannot see the published blog for myself.

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.

Well I have been thrown in the middle of Shanghai's ridiculous traffic/transportation system, as my homestay is about 3 miles from the community college where the "content/cultural course" will take place on Mon/Wed/Fri. The community college is in the same complex as the program center and student apartments (where everyone else lives). Sunli (my homestay dad) showed me the bus stops that will take me to the college on Sunday afternoon, which at first made me wonder if he was just going to throw me to the wolves and say "here's your bus, good luck." But he quickly reassured me that the other homestay students would be joining me on the first trip. On monday morning I went next door to meet another student (Walid-from somewhere in Jordan) to get on the bus. His homestay dad went along with us and so did another student's homestay mom.

I thought I knew what a crowded bus looked like. There was enough people on our bus to fill one of King County Metro's accordian buses with the aisle filled, but this bus was only about forty feet long. We literally had to pull our way into the back door using the railings, and the back door pushed us in a little further further when it closed behind us. Standing in the exit isn't ideal, especially when the bus stops at the Zhongshan Park station and 75% of the people want off to transfer to the lightrail.

After getting to our building we had a few hours of orientation and then explored the surrounding area. The orientiation was pretty typical, what to do and what not to do...but our Cultural Studies professor mentioned something that made most of us think a little bit- he said he was recently in New York City and felt like it was a little too slow paced and the streets weren't very crowded. When we explored the surrounding neighborhood we got a sense of what he meant. I haven't seen The Bund or the Pudong Financial Zone yet (the cosmopolitan and downtown areas of Shanghai, respectively), but after our exploration yesterday I am interested to see how much busier and erratic a place can possibly be.

I'm in China, and I don't know where to begin with this. I feel like I have already seen so much just by coming from the airport to the program office and checking in. Since leaving Vancouver, there has been three 'events' that I will likely always remember as marking the beginning of this trip:

1. The first was during the flight; about four hours away from Shanghai the ground became visible for a little while. It wasn't really "ground", but some islands somewhere off the coast of Siberia or China. Normally during flights I look out and visualize the airplane in relation to a map of the U.S. and figure out which part of which state I am looking at and what type of people live there. But seeing these islands and not even knowing what country I was looking at let alone who lived there made me realize how far away I was going to be, and how many new things I was going to see. And looking back after just 12 hours in China I still probably don't have any idea how much I'm going to see.

2. Next was a series of events proceeding from the plane landing at Shanghai Pudong Intl to the bus ride from the airport to the area of the city that I will be living in for the eight weeks.

• Descending into the city, I had awoken to realize that I could just make out the curvature of the earth, and decided I was going to try to get it on my camera. This was my first experience with the smog surrounding the city. By the time I was ready with my camera, we were just about level with the floor of clouds we had been above during the flight. I focused on the vewfinder of the camera and took a a picture, but we entered the clouds immediately afterward. I put my camera down, to see that these really weren't clouds, but brown smog. The ground wasn't visible until we were below about 5,000 feet.
• Exiting the plane was like walking into the bathroom after someone has taken a long, hot shower. You seem to take shorter breaths because the humidity is so high. I figured that this was just the jetway, which wasn't air conditioned, but entering the airport was hardly any better. They do have some air conditioning going on, but it only cools the air without any dehumidification.
• After getting our bags (which were sitting in the corner because our flight had apparentely already had its turn on its carousel), we walked through the customs gate unchallenged (unlike the passport/visa checkpoint, which took about an hour). This was the first time of the trip that I'd had my camera ready. We entered a winding mass of people looking for their groups. Their groups were looking for them also; our herd of people was lined with people shoulder-to-shoulder holding all sorts of signs, yelling for their passengers. It felt like the paparazzi- hundreds of people looking at each exiting passenger to make sure their signs were read. Somehow I spotted our sign (a piece of notebook paper with "ciee" scribbled in red marker) and we met our two chaperones.
• The last part was the busride into the city (not quite as cool as a trip on the 200mph maglev train would have been). Every few minutes a new skyline appeared out of the smog, with skyskrapers and tower cranes literally as far as you could see. Giant billboards bridged across the highway, advertising cars and other products made by companies we had heard of before, and many we had not. Tiny cars, huge buses, and everything inbetween bolted across lanes of the road (apparently you can do anything you want as long as you honk first). Off the highway, bikes and pedestrians filled the streets, most were carrying armloads of bags and other miscellaneous crap.

3. Meeting my host family has made me even more excited about the upcoming eight weeks. Huang Ming, my host mom, grabbed me immediately after I stepped off the bus, showed me an envelope with my name on it and gave me a hug and said 'Ni Hao'. She must have had a picture of me, as she knew who I was before I had even seen her. She speaks no english, and got her husband, Sun Li, to take one of my bags to their car. Sun has limited english skills, and we were able to communicate enough in english to show me to the house, give me a tour, feed me dumplings and let me shower. They have a nice apartment; very clean with darkly-stained hardwood floors and nice furniture...no air conditioning.

I will be on my own during the day as they both work (Sun is a professor and Huang works for the government), meaning I have to ride the bus the classes at the off campus program center, and walk a few blocks to the University for classes. Luckily I will be accompanied by another student from the program the first day, his host family lives in the same apartment complex.

Time for bed, it's 4 am local time. It will take a couple days to move my daily routine ahead 15 hours. I'll add some photos soon.