Sunday, December 21, 2008

First Day- 8:41pm Sunday

We finally arrived at about 8:45ish when we were supposed to arrive at 7:30. Oh well, it was raining as Judy met us at the airport right after going through immigration. It's funny they have these little machines you can rate your officer on, I gave him a "satisfactory" He wasn't very friendly! We took a cheap taxi ride from Shanghai Pudong International Airport to the apartment. Rain was lightly drizzling as we sat in the car, eating chocolate from my mom's student. It was so interesting, looking at all the signs as we passed by in the taxi. Judy's Chinese navigation skills are rather impressive! Upon arriving at the apartment, we unpacked and drank a cup of coffee before planning our adventures for the rest of the day.

We stopped at Judy's favorite restaurant and ordered a typical Chinese dish: Porage! Strange enough as it seems, sweet and savory rice porage alike are served in a typical Chinese restaurant as a meal. For about 5$ we had 4 bowls of different types of porage, steaming hot green tea, pot stickers and egg rolls. We ate it down, before heading off to the train station to do some shopping.

Judy says there are three basic rules:
  1. Trucks > Cars > Bikes > people
  2. Do not tip anybody
  3. People do not say excuse me, so don't be offended
We quickly experienced rule number one countless times within minutes, lets face it: People in Shanghai don't care if they run you over. We headed off to the metro station, swerving through the rickshaws and finally made it in. The train is much cleaner then San Diego trains, and we we arrived at our stop we were greeted by a tidal wave of people, and peddlers a like (not to mention the insane amount of cute Asian guys ♥) If you reader ever go to China, when a peddler approaches, pretend to speak Spanish (it wards them off). People sell everything here, from "real" Rolex watches to fresh Lychee fruit. However our motive was elsewhere: the discount DVD shop!


We bought quite a lot of DVDs, so much that they gave us a free CD case to hold them in. But there was little time to dawdle, since we had to hurry through the wind over to the vegetarian restaurant to meet some friends. It was a coworker of Judy's husband and he had brought over his wife and two sons to China. One was 19 and another was 22, both studying to become a teacher. The 19-year-old was really nice, he is majoring in Japanese culture so we had a nice discussion! When I told them I was merely 13 when they asked my age, they were shocked. I find that to be rather funny.

After the delicious food, we took a taxi cab to the apartment with the lingering smell of the promise of dim sum soon. I proceeded to get ready for bed, in which I am in now. So goodbye for now!

2 comments:

Emily said...

hey omg that sounds like fun!
hahah
so when u went to the dvd stores did u get me twilight?
so how was the flight?
hope to talk to you soon!

jaclyn said...

Awesome!