First Days in Shanghai

vosechu@create-on.com (Chuck Vose) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:03:00 -0500

Program Description

The most common question I received when I decided to come to China was about the structure of the program. A close second was what was Fudan University like. Naturally, being the lazy ass that I am I couldn’t answer these questions but I am now prepared to state that I got lucky as hell.

Fudan is a fantastic college. Fantastically huge campus at least. We saw an aerial model of the thing and at 1:1000 scale it takes up about 100 sqft; that’s more than a good apartment in Shanghai. I believe that you would need a bike or taxi to get from one end to another. But it is also fantastically beautiful though probably not quite as beautiful as my first college. We have our own floor in the 25-story Guang Hua building with safe drinking fountains (!) and a little zen garden for smoking. I think that you have to work pretty hard to convince people to smoke outside here, so we get a zen garden.

The program is structured like you would expect any good uni to be, we have 12 credit hours of Chinese per week with 1.5 credit hours of Culture and 1.5 hours of Politics or Economics. We are taught by graduate students who are very, very young. I have been assured that by the end of the year 2/3 of them will have hooked up with their students at least once. Lacking this option to get ahead however I will rely on petty bribery and hard work to get good grades.

Outside of the language class there are some other learning periods that I haven’t experienced yet as we are just entering our second day. Something about a language lunch and some 1-on-1 time but I’m never quite clear which things are for just the intensive program and which apply to me. The Alliance has been miserable about organizing this aspect, nobody has any idea which classes they’re in and up until yesterday probably half of us hadn’t signed up for a class.

There are also 2 divisions of classes, intensive and cultural. The cultural program is more about learning some Chinese as well as experiencing as much as possible. The intensive program is a little crazy; they spend something like 20 hours doing Chinese and are required to take a language pledge that they will not speak any other languages during the semester under penalty of being suspended. I am extremely glad that I didn’t decide to do this because I would be very lonely for a long time. Naturally, this aspect of the program was documented nowhere on the website that I saw.

Big Man in Little Korea

My biggest fear about traveling to China was that I had a 10-ish hour layover in Incheon Korea so that I would arrive in China at a reasonable hour in the morning instead of getting to the airport at 3am. But what the hell do you do in an airport for 10-ish hours? The Internet yielded no interesting ideas to me and the thought of taking a cab into the city was appealing but very expensive; the nearest hostel was 1.5 hours away by taxi so would have been quite expensive.

So I did what anyone would do, I decided to just meditate on the problem until it fixed itself for me; this took about 10 minutes until I realized that I was sitting in the same row as Becca and Dan Lanaghan from UPS. They live in Seoul. Why didn’t I think of this?! Fortunately we hadn’t spoken in about 3 years so we had enough to keep us talking for the entire 14 hour flight. It did make me realize that I really don’t stay caught up with facebook nearly well enough.

They have new kitties. Oh man it was sweet. It’s hard to be mad about getting woken up in the middle of the night when it’s because a kitten is weaseling their way under the covers with you. God damn I’m such a cat lady.

After a long sleep Dan and Becca taxied me to the bus stop where I promptly realized that I couldn’t read the signs and had no idea when to expect the bus. I ended up waiting for about 50 minutes panicking silently that I didn’t know how many buses I was missing that would take me to the right place. Turns out that I hadn’t missed a single one but had arrived about 3 minutes after the bus I was supposed to catch. Luckily a fellow showed up with luggage like my own and I decided to follow him to the airport. As it turned out he also spoke very good English so we chatted the whole time about the Internet, Korea, and business. And like all the Asians that have shaken my hand so far he wanted to hold my hand for a surprisingly long time.

Oh, when I say bus I actually mean multi-passenger limousines. They’re really damn sweet. No jacuzzi but it does have reclining cushy seats and plenty of room for luggage. They cost about 13k won which I believe is about $13 though it may be less now that the Korean economy is dying a painful death at the hands of their American masters.

First Post!

I believe that I was the first to arrive because nobody at my apartment had any idea who I was or what I was doing there. It seemed a fitting way to start the day considering how easy it was to get a taxi to take me to my apartment (150RMB btw, about $20). It could also be that I kept talking to the guy who looked to be in charge but spoke absolutely no English whatsoever.

Eventually the front desk found our program coordinator, Ella Ding, who turns out to be a totally fantastic lady. She helped me get checked in a day early at the modest cost of 70RMB (which puts the apartment at about $300/mo). I thought it was hilarious that she was totally amazed that I had made it all the way from the States by myself without speaking any Chinese or Korean at all. I guess things could have gone way worse but I’m refusing to ask her what she thought might happen.

When I got up to my building I was a little worried from the outside. It’s a 14-story, bland, pink building that like all Shanhai buildings looks like it’s starting to fall apart. When I got up to the room however I was taken aback by how completely gorgeous the place is. My first impression was that it was furnished with a big TV, chairs and couches, nice coordinated furniture, a kitchen with an actual stovetop, washing machine, and not only running water, but hot water at that (the maintenance ladies were especially proud of this bit which scares the hell out of me to think of their house).

And to this day I still think the place is nice, certainly worth ever USD, but it’s also all fake and low quality like everything I’ve seen in Shanghai so far. The wood flooring is fake, the coordinated furniture is extremely fake, the washing machine’s pipes were fake (.5mm thick piping which rusted through and fell off the machine), the Internet cables were fake, and the heaters were so clogged that I spent the first night at about 8 degrees C (in Fahrenheit this is “butt-ass-cold”). Most of these things have been fixed but every single person that moved in has a similar story of their apartment having something completely broken be it the heater, the running water, the washing machine, the shower heads, etc.

My theory is that Shanghai is either planning obsolescence in a way that puts America to shame (“50 years until things fall apart!? Make it 10! We’ll show those Americans!”) or it’s really impossible to buy quality products. It could be a little of both but I can say with some certainty that there is no place like home depot here where you can buy a new pipe, you just buy it from the guy who’s biking around with the stack of oddly shaped pipes on the back of his tricycle. He in turn bought them from a bigger dirty-broken-pipe vendor or stole them off of a construction scaffolding which means it’s already half rusted through from the corrosive salt and lack of water-proof coating.

Pipes are a great one but paint is the same way, all the paint is peeling in Shanghai making the whole city look mottled. Except for the suburbs of course, where everything is pristine and looks exactly like an American gated community (or so I hear, I refuse to go there on principles).

So yeah, where was I?

Ah yes, first night was spent freezing my ass off. They fixed the heater the next day but I bought a blanket anyways. It cost about 3 dollars and is worth exactly that. I’m unclear on whether the blanket is the cause of my minor sickness or if it’s the dust in the heater, normal bug from being around people, or the pollution in the city. Certainly the blanket is extremely uncomfortable to sleep under so I thank my lucky stars every day because Erica was nice enough to make me a sheet pocket before I left. I use it every night and love the hell out of it. Serves me right for buying a blanket at Wal-Mart. I was assured that Wal-Mart was different in China, and it is in a LOT of ways, but it’s still shitty, child-labor manufactured bullshit items for the most part. Where you find good blankets is still a mystery to me right now.

I’ll have to write more about my first day tomorrow. Jesus this was a long post. Time to go to class and get ready for the day!

"First Days in Shanghai" by Chuck Vose

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:38:50 -0500

Good lord man! Have you never deep fried cheese before? Though the title wasn’t specifically about that I can see that there really is a need for a blog about Butter and Cheese!

We can do this first thing when I come home.

"First Days in Shanghai" by Nathan

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:43:27 -0500