Water

Every day since the day I arrived in Shanghai, there has been a thunderstorm at around 4pm. The heat and humidity builds and builds throughout the day until finally when nobody can take it any more, it breaks out in a spectacular thunderstorm. Today it resulted in a minor flood. 2-6 inches of standing water in the street is fun to ride a bike through.

Food, Rain, and Massages

This morning both Carl and I woke up before 4am again, having passed out at around 6:30pm the night before, without eating dinner. By 6 or 7am we were both starving and decided to go find breakfast, which came in the form of some fried batter thing with an egg and meat, cooked streetside, of course. We returned to the room so I could talk to Hilary when she got home from work at 8 (am here, pm there), and set out again to run more errands around 10. First, back to the international office at Fudan to finish up registration and pay tuition, and then to the grocery store to buy toiletries. In the checkout line at the grocery store there was a little boy who was apparently impressed with our English-speaking abilities, and watched us the whole time as if we were putting on a show. Next we stopped in a shoe store in the mall outside the grocery store, and I bought a pair of “Qiao Dan” shoes, better known in the US as Jordans. Although I wish to wear as little as possible in this heat and humidity, all of this running around has my flip flops wearing thin fast.

I am very thankful to have a bike again, it is truly a necessity here. We need to cover literally miles to take care of all of the things we need to do, and it is tiresome to walk and expensive (relatively) to take cabs.

We had lunch at my favorite authentic Chinese restaurant, and the stomachache I had from the greasy breakfast went away and was quickly replaced with a stomachache from overeating. Having spent enough time in the heat, we returned to the room to relax in the air conditioning and watch a movie.

In the afternoon, it rained a spectacular thunderstorm, just like yesterday, and continued a soft rain with random flashes of lightning into the evening.

When I passed out again at 6pm, Carl woke me up and forced me to get up and go get dinner and a massage so that we would stay awake until a reasonable hour and help our jet lag issues. So we rode our bikes over to where we used to live and found the dark alley that we knew to be a hot spot for peddlers of “chaofan, chaomian!” (fried rice, fried noodles). We found a spot on the sidewalk with shelter from the rain and ate our meals and watched the lightning.

Full again, we went for massages. 90-minute, full-body massages. Bliss. Our umbrellas were stolen out of our bicycle baskets when we came out, but I wasn’t even mad.

Great Success

At 7:00 this morning, we set out for breakfast. We found dumplings (10 for about 30 cents). Then, we tackled the living situation once again. After speaking to several different people in various offices, we finally found somebody who knew what was going on. She pointed us to the hotel where the summer program students are supposed to stay. So we checked out of the first hotel with all of our luggage, caught a cab, went 10 minutes in the wrong direction, had the driver read the address off the pamphlet again, and arrived at the new hotel. After paying for the entire month’s stay, in cash, we arrived in our room. It’s actually quite nice; a suite with two single rooms, a small common area, a bathroom between the two of us, air conditioning, and internet for around $11 per person per night. All in all, much better than the foreign students’ dorm.

After a quick breather, we set off to complete a few more errands, as it was still only 11am. The new place is further from campus, about a mile or two, which made for another long walk in the heat and humidity. Thankfully, before the day really heated up (y’know, from the 90° it started at), a thunderstorm came through. Caught out, Carl and I took refuge with twenty or so Chinese under a bicycle parking awning and watched the torrential rainfall for half an hour until a woman came by selling umbrellas for 10 yuan. Opportunist.

Buying cell phones and bikes was relatively uneventful; just the usual little bargaining game that you have to play for almost everything here. Sometimes it can be fun, but after some time it becomes tiresome, and especially difficult to put up with after you’ve been on your feet all day. Good thing everything is dirt cheap anyway.

Now that it’s 6pm I’m exhausted, having had a full and successful day of settling in. I would enjoy another foot massage, but I’m too tired and lazy to find a place again.

The Return to Shanghai

So I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue my blog from my last time in Shanghai, but within moments of arriving I realized why I did it in the first place. China generates way too many stories not to write down.

The journey went like this: Woke up at 3:45am, took of from La Guardia at 8:00am after a half hour delay, fell asleep. Woke up at Chicago O’Hare, met Carl at the gate, waited for our plane to arrive, and took off after another 3 hours delay. Sat in a chair for seven hours, fell asleep somewhere over the North Pole, and woke up at Pu Dong international airport another six hours later, where the pilot informs us that the outside temperature is 37°C, 99°F. He didn’t mention the 100% humidity, which I discovered immediately as I stepped off the plane.

Shanghai is split into two halves by the Huangpu river, Pu Dong (poo-dong, east) and Pu Xi (poo-shee, west). Pu Xi is where the city originally grew, with nothing but farmland across the river in Pu Dong. The European countries that claimed spheres of influence in Chinese cities in the days of imperialism built their houses, businesses, and white-only polo clubs here, in Pu Xi. So in an effort to make the most impressive portion of the city theirs again, the Chinese created the Pu Dong development zone, which, when I was here two years ago, contained an eighth of all of the world’s construction cranes. When you see a picture of the Shanghai skyline, it is always of Pu Dong, with the Pearl tower, the Jin Mao tower, and another, taller than the rest, that wasn’t there last time. Pu Dong international airport, designed to be the largest hub in all of Asia, is just one of the monstrous projects. It still feels like any other airport though.

After going through immigration and getting our luggage, Carl and I walked through the corral at the exit, where hundreds of Chinese drivers stand with signs for the people they are to pick up. Outside the airport, the heat and humidity is suffocating. Immediately a Chinese man spotted us and asked “Taxi? Follow me.” As we started off behind him, I thought for a moment perhaps we should negotiate a price first, but Carl (it’s all his fault) insisted that it would be a metered cab. After following a the man through parking garages and up a stairwell that was 20° hotter than the air outside and smelled like urine (definitely on my list of top ten “worst places to spend more than 30 seconds”), we got to the car. It was nice, with leather seats, air conditioning, and a driver already waiting inside. We loaded up our luggage and got in. Now that we had given up almost all leverage in negotiating a price, it was clear that we must. They demanded 700 yuan, and we were only able to talk them down to 500 for a ride that would cost around 150 at the most on a meter. We both knew better than this, we say, but I suppose we were just rusty. Oh well, lesson learned. It was still only around $60 for an hour’s ride all the way from the airport in Pu Dong to Fudan in Pu Xi, and the car had seat belts.

When we arrived at the foreign students’ dorm, we went to the registration desk and showed our admission notices. After looking through several rather unorganized lists of names, none of which included either of us, we were told that they had no rooms for us until late August. Strike one. A disappointing blow, but nothing we weren’t mentally prepared for; this is China, and this is the way things work. We have a number to call about housing, but it was after business hours, so we admitted defeat for the time being and took a cab (metered this time, only 11 yuan) to the hotel. After dumping our luggage, changing out of sweat-soaked clothes, and turning on the air conditioner full-blast, we left to attempt some of the first-day errands we had planned. Bicycles were first on the list. Once we had bicycles, the other errands would be easier. So we walked to back over to the area by the dorm, with which we are both familiar, and to the bike shop. Closed. Strike two. Oh well, that will have to wait until tomorrow. From there, we walked to the electronics store to look at cell phones. Also closed. Strike three.

So it was time for dinner. Muslim noodles; two heaping, steaming plates for 12 yuan ($1.50). From there we walked back toward the hotel, and considered finding an internet café. But after having traveled several miles on foot for no apparent reason, we decided to get foot massages instead (20 yuan for 45 minutes). Back at the hotel we put in a DVD Carl bought during our wanderings (The 300, not on sale in the States for a few days yet) and much to my surprise, I passed out almost immediately. I woke up, fully clothed and confused, just before 4am and found that Carl was wide awake as well. It’s now about 6am and we just finished watching the movie, for real this time. Check out time is noon, so we have that long to figure out where we are going to live before we have to worry about moving luggage again. But first we’ll attempt breakfast.