Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai two days ago after our flight from Beijing was delayed for three hours. So far, I like it better than Beijing. Something about it feels like a more developed city. Things like subway rides and taxis are slightly more expensive, but it’s still way cheaper than in the U.S.

My final time in Beijing was spent with Joel’s class as they gave their final presentations for the projects that they had been working on all semester. It was pretty cool to see how the students from Taiwan, Beijing, and Los Angeles worked together for the past six months. That night everyone got together to go out, and we ended up with splintered groups going every which way until we all meet up at a small club called Propaganda. Prior to this, the group Joel and I were with wandered down an alley and sat for a while eating what Joel has dubbed ‘meat-sticks’ (ie. lamb, chicken heart, beef, etc.)

Our hostel in Shanghai is the nicest I’ve ever seen (even though its only my third.) The city is great, and the skyline across the Bund is incredible. Last night, we went to an acrobatics show that cost us just 80¥. We found our way over to the 280¥ seats, and the show was impressive – not Cirque status – but still cool.

I’ll try to get some photos up soon.

Hello world (Beijing)

Flight over from Seattle
View from the plane from Seattle... taken at 1am

So for the next three months or so, this blog will become the place where I put as much stuff about my summer travels as possible. Most of my posts will come from the iOS WordPress app, so posts will be short but hopefully frequent.

Today is my second full day here in China.

I flew in to Beijing at 10:30pm on Saturday night and stayed with my friend Joel who’s finishing up a class here. We’ll be traveling through the rest of China starting Wednesday. Yesterday we went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square early in the day, and then I headed back to the airport to pick up our friend Dan, who’ll be studying at Nankai University. We took a bus to the school in Tianjin and found an awesome dive bar to celebrate Dan’s birthday at. Luckily his roommate speaks fairly good Chinese already, so he helped us get around.

I’m back in Beijing today. To get back (because another two hour bus ride didn’t sound too fun) I took the bullet train that runs between the two cities. It was awesome (350km/hr.)

Just checked in to my hostel for tonight and tomorrow night. It was impossible to find, but it’s really nice.

The air here is horrible, but that was to be expected. I wish I spoke Chinese, so I’m going to work on that in a few minutes. Things are pretty cheap, but I’ve spent more money than I intended to. Guess that’s just because I’ve been back and forth between here and Tianjin, and it was Dan’s birthday. Not a big deal.

I have some cool pictures on my phone, but I can’t seem to get them onto the blog.

This is going to be an interesting summer.