Shanghai Bob

On Friday I spent most of the afternoon fixing up Andrew’s website and helping LiYan set up hers from scratch. We went for a Mongolian dinner Friday night, and afterward wandered around XiuJiaHui to get a feel for the neighborhood. I took a picture of Andrew and LiYan, and two girls who were also wandering around wandered closer, so I took a picture of them when they posed with their phones.

We had a funny exchange in which Andrew and I talked to LiYan in Japanese, LiYan talked to the girls in Chinese, and Andrew and I talked to each other in English, so nobody could understand more than two sets of conversations. Anyway, we figured out that the girl on the left had a birthday but her party had been canceled (sounds like a sob story), so we invited them to Hengshan Road with us, bought the birthday girl dumplings and juice, and practiced Chinese with them. I ran out of phrases in about two minutes and introduced the peanut game, a logic game that kept us occupied for an hour or so.

The girls were fans of Japanese culture, and used the Japanese word “kawaii” about themselves, giving it a Chinese pronunciation.

Andrew and Liyan picked me up at the airport when I arrived in Shanghai on October 2nd.  We rode the MagLev train in at 431 km/hr or about 270 miles/hr.  This is well over twice as fast as the German trains.  The inbound and outbound tracks are close together, so when the two trains pass each other at a combined 540 miles/hr, the sides rattle like a tin shed.

The airplane was crowded, noisy, and smelly.  Shanghai is…not much different!

We took my luggage directly to a restaurant that serves Peking Duck.

I’m staying at the Tianping Hotel in the French Concession.  This is practically across the street from Jiao Tong University, where I’m thinking of studying.

Today is China’s “National Day”, the anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1949.  It’s an auspicious day to be flying to Shanghai for a three-week scouting trip — if all goes well I’ll be there tomorrow and Schwinger will pick me up from the airport.  The weather turned windy and rainy here overnight, but it looks sunny and clear today and tomorrow in Shanghai/Pudong.

Today is also the beginning of my third month of intentional unemployment — I’m still not used to it!

I’m leaving now to catch my train to the airport.