First Few Days

So, as of now we’re three days in to our China trip. Currently I can’t make any blog posts as the website is blocked by the Chinese government. They really take their Internet seriously over here. I’m going to try and split a VPN with Elliott to get around the restrictions that they have.

So far the stay has been great. The city is a lot like NYC in most spots and the campus is completely gated and feels like a whole other area by itself. I’ll try to post pictures of it when I buy a camera, but our dorm is on a beautiful river full of lily pads and old-school Chinese mediation areas. The only thing that has put a damper on the whole trip is the obscene amount of humidity. It’s about 90 degrees with 90% humidity. It makes walking around pretty damn tough. You go through at least two shirts a day and I’m running super low on baby powder.

There is a pretty good crew of people from all over the US in our program. It’s been a little weird cause not everyone has been wanting to go out at night, which seems completely ridiculous to me. Since I really never felt any jetlag from the flight, I was rearing to go out with a huge crew both nights, and it just hasn’t been the case. The small group of five we went out with on Sunday was really fun. We randomly took a cab to the French Concession and just walked around until we saw a bunch gussied up Chinese chicks stumble down a flight of stairs and figured that that would be the place for us. It ended up being one of the best night clubs I’ve ever been to and a spot we will for sure make it back to. We got bottle service for $20 a person and rocked out loving the lady gaga they were blasting all night.

Last night was just as fun and random, as we ended up looking through the Shanghai Frommers to find a place to eat and go out to. We found that the French Concession is really the place to go for foreign kids on somewhat of a budget. It was a lot like Greenwhich Village with all of the trendy boutiques. We got a $5 Shanghainese feast at a spot called Grape that was inside a Russian Orthodox Church. Even though we were all pretty tired, we toughed it out and went to a alternative/punk rock kind of bar that was really cool. It was the epitome of a dive bar, poorly lit with graffiti all over the walls and Chinese guys chain smoking on couches, but with a DJ playing really good old school hip hop. As the night went on and the pijiu (beer) and bai jiu (chinese rice whisky) kept flowing, the group of like 12 people slowly began to realize that it might have been a gay bar. I think it was after a Chinese guy kissed Elliotts hand and then went on to kiss our friend Emeka’s ear, when we realized that the bar might have just been very gay friendly on Mondays. It seemed like it just might be the place to be on a Saturday or something when we would bring more than just 4 chicks with us.

Tonight we’re going out for a birthday party with some girls from Spellman College in ATL who are absolute characters, so we can’t wait to see what tonight brings us. School doesn’t start until Monday, so until then I’ll try to update this pretty frequently.