Susie in Shanghai

Yesterday I got to see a lot more of the city, although my tour wasn’t exactly planned. Since I still have some jetlag and wake up every morning around 5:30 or 6am, I decided I should go to my gym before classes.  I wrote down a map for myself with the street names, etc. but accidentally ended up at the Ritz (same building as where my classes are).  I went inside and they gave me very detailed instructions on how to get to the gym.  I have a fairly good sense of direction, but I didn’t have my glasses with me/had trouble reading the street signs/some of the roads are confusing… Needless to say, I ended up wandering around Shanghai for about 2 hours, and I never found the gym.  It was a really nice tour of the city though, I must say. I went down a lot of side streets and alleys and saw some really interesting markets and stands along the way.  I’m not even sure what this area was called, but it only took about 25 minutes to find my way back to Jing’an Temple.  The one downside to my unplanned excursion was that it was raining pretty hard and I didn’t have an umbrella. I’ve been using a poncho in the meantime, and although everyone here wears them, the locals still seem to get a kick out of me wearing one (pointing, laughing, etc).

After my little trip I went to class and started to learn some grammar.  Although mandarin is complicated in that there are four ‘tones’ and adding a different one to the same word completely changes it’s meaning, there really aren’t any verb conjugations.  So if I want to say ‘to go’ or ‘going’, you use one verb that means to go.  The other woman in my class is really sweet too. She is from Germany, but lived in the UK for two years previously, and is going to be living in China until 2013, because of her husband’s job.

Not too much happened yesterday because I was mostly making flash cards and preparing for my first interview, which is today.  I will be speaking with a man who is in charge of business development in China for an international life science company. I know that it is a little vague, but he prefers to remain anonymous. It should still be a really interesting interview!

At night I explored a new area called Xintiandi.  According to Fodor’s, this area used to be an 8-acre collection of stone houses that was renovated into an upscale shopping complex and renamed Xintiandi, or “New Heaven on Earth.” Clearly it was quite beautiful and Matt, Bowen, and I explored the area for a little while before dinner. The picture for this post is of Matt and I trying to show off a beautiful building…kind of a fail, but at least we look cute ;). Apparently there are some good bars in Xintiandi as well, so I’m sure we’ll be back.  For dinner we went to a place called Bellagio, which was down the road.  We met up with two more Georgetown students–Peter, who lives with Bowen, and Faith, a girl in Matt’s chinese classes at gtown.  It was a really fun time! Everyone here is doing something completely different for work, so it was really interesting hearing about everyone’s daily experiences. We all ordered a bunch of delicious meals and ate family style.  It was authentic Chinese food, but seemed to cater a little bit to westerners because most of the meat was boneless.  I also learned how to use chopsticks (woohoo!), so eating wasn’t as frustrating as usual.

I’ve got to do a little bit of last-minute prep for class, so I’m off. But check back if you want to see the first “Professional” post aka my first interview that I will be putting up either tonight or tomorrow morning.

Side note: apparently every Wednesday night is “Ladies Night” at the bars here in Shanghai, so hopefully I’ll have a fun story about that as well!