First Week of Shenanigans

School finally started on Monday. My 4 week extended summer in Madison and Shanghai is finally over. It was wild while it lasted, but I actually needed some sense of structure in my life. Going out every night for almost four weeks was burning me out a little bit. I know I’m going to regret saying that in about 2 weeks.
The past week has gone by soooooo fast. People FINALLY started going out at night and we have been having a crazy fun time (Everyone, but my roommate who hasn’t gone out at night once. I don’t have a problem with it, but it can get awkward when I roll into the room at 5, only to have him wake up at 630. But whatever). The bar scene/ club life is nuts here, but all seems to be concentrated in one section of town the French Concession. Apparently it’s the only place to get a semi-cheap drink in town. The real action is the bars in the Concession that have all you can drink specials for like $10-14 USD. We’ve done that a few times and it gets real loose (Ya Clare I just used a Montclair term. Sue me).
It seems like all we do is go out at night, but during the day we have actually been real productive in getting our super touristy things out of the way.
We’ve knocked off the Bund (Shanghai’s ode to money) with it’s amazing views of the Pudong financial district, seen a ridiculous acrobat show, and have even been to 3 art galleries downtown. ( I think I’m making it my goal to come away from this trip as an intellectual, but it remains to be seen. I’m even going to take a Friday morning art class with Flans every week.)
On Friday we spent the entire afternoon at the World Expo. (The biggest world’s fair since the late 1800’s that cost more than the Beijing Olympics). It was absolutely ridiculous, kind of like Epcot on the steroids that Barry Bonds was taking. We ended up only going to a few pavilions: Lithuania, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Philippines, Belgium and China. We turned the entire experience into an international pub crawl; we had drinks in every pavilion we hit, making the day into a really fun event. Poland and Lithuania were definitely my favorites with there huge beers and amazing Eastern European food (I’m a total sucker for pierogies and piroshki)

Other than that, no more news on the Eastern front. School is kind of intense with all of the language classes we’re taking. They're and hour and 50 min long and the core classes are 3 hrs long. We even have to have a tutor twice a week. It can be kind of ridiculous. Flans and I are planning a trip to the base camp of Mt.Everest in Tibet right now. We got the inside scoop from a beautiful Tibetan woman named Kathy at the Expo. Hopefully we get that rolling before our week long break on the 1st. I’ll let ya’ll know tho.