Today is the end of my second full day in Shanghai, and boy has it been interesting. I made it here on Friday the 25th at around 3:40, which was a little later than expected but not too much. Both flights were good nothing exciting. The one from Logan to Toronto was short only about an hour and half, and I had the seat right behind first class so there was a lot of extra legroom. The one from Shanghai was pretty good as well, just very long I think it turned out to be 15 hours total. The plane had a lot of movies which was really nice when the got working. I finally got to see The Internship, which was really exciting, and pretty good. Once, we landed it took about 20 minutes to finally get let off the plane and meet up with the two boys on my flight from school.
After getting off the plane we had to go through customs, which was much easier then when I went through customs in England it only took 20 or so minutes. After finding our luggage was the hard part Matt, JP and myself set out to find our partners who were anxiously wait for us with signs that read WPI.
After around 10 minutes of walking through rows and rows of people waiting to pick people up for the airport we found everyone. One of the other WPI students (Marissa) was already there with our Chinese partners waiting for us. We quickly got money from the ATM, and headed for the taxi to go to campus. The taxi was mildly frightening; there was a lot of honking and swerving. We go to campus, found and checked into our dorm and ate dinner. The first night I just ate some rice, then we headed to the market to buy some essentials like toilet paper towels and water. We were all pretty beat from traveling and it was around 9 pm at this point so we went home showered and unpacked and went to bed.
Saturday was a little more exciting. I met up with Marissa and Matt in the morning, two students from another group, and their Chinese partner in the morning. We got our cell phones, and went to a dumpling house for lunch (I didn’t eat at this point), and got our University Cards. I then had a meeting with my partners to prepare for a presentation. After the meeting Arm and I (my WPI partner), went and had dinner (which again I just had some rice), and Starbucks J (which if anyone knows me is a most at all times). We tried to go to a famous Chinese Acrobats with Marissa and Matt, but it was sold out. We ended up just exploring the shops and the grocery store. The grocery store is very different then anything you will ever see in America. They have all sorts of live fish, turtles, dried whole fish, many different snacks including chicken feet that are dried. After that we all just went back to the dorm because it was pretty late.
Sunday we had to be up pretty early for our final PQP presentations for all of our advisors. First we walked around the streets and everyone else got some breakfast, I packed a Lara bar with me and just ate that. We did our presentations, which went really well, especially because some of the students hadn’t spoken English much before. The WPI Professor brought everyone to lunch after that, I again just ate some rice. Lunch was pretty exciting out partners were super nice, and kept refilling you glass every time is was empty and doing cheers. The rest of the day my group prepared for our visit to Caterpillar tomorrow morning, and fixed our presentation. However the best part of the day was dinner!!! Arm and myself went to sushi, and it was the first actual meal I have eaten since Wednesday night. The sushi was wonderful, we sat at the middle table around the kitchen so we got to watch them make it, and around the inside of our table was a belt that the sushi passed by on and you could pick whatever you would like. I was a little adventurous and tried octopus and sea urchin, I didn’t like the Sea Urchin but the Octopus was very good. That’s most of what I have done so far it has been very exciting and a lot to take in. As I mentioned tomorrow morning we will be going to Caterpillar to meet with our sponsor and get a better understanding of what we will be doing. Tuesday Marissa and Matt found a Quiz Night at and Australian bar down town that we are going to check out, I let you know how that is.
That’s all for now and don’t forget to check out my flicker for pictures.
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