Well, Peter and I and our 250 pounds of luggage have arrived in Shanghai. We spent a lovely last North American day in Vancouver, Canada, toward the end of its summer. We enjoyed the sunshine and black squirrels of Stanley Park and our final North American meal was at a Ukrainian restaurant, which was the furthest thing from Asian food we could find. I can’t imagine we will be eating much borscht or piroghies in China. Vancouver was a nice introduction to living abroad and a nice transition to life in another country—just foreign enough to be exciting without being overwhelmingly unfamiliar.
Of course that all changed when we touched down in Shanghai after our 12-hour flight (in-flight movie was Blades of Glory—Peter and I were laughing audibly while our Chinese co-passengers looked on in horror). With my basic Chinese (turn left, go straight, turn right) and a primitive map Gina made me, we made it to Grant’s apartment surprisingly with ease.
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We arrived at 5:00 in the evening and after adventuring to the grocery store to buy frozen dumplings and two large bottles of Reeb (Shanghai’s own brew…”beer” spelled backwards if you didn’t catch that). We were in bed by 8:00.
Wide awake at 3:00 the next morning, we watched Chinese television, which mostly consists of period-piece soap operas and infomercials for body augmentation pills. There is one English station, which is presented in “Special English,” a simplified version of the language for non-native speakers that consists of simple declarative sentences and monosyllabic vocabulary. Imagine the world news in the form of a Dick and Jane book. Eventually the rest of Shanghai began to awaken and we watched the elderly Chinese neighbors doing Tai Chi with swords in the apartment courtyard and listened to all the men of the neighborhood coughing up their first phlegm of the day.
We spent the day exploring Fudan University where Peter starts taking classes in the English-taught master’s program in Chinese Politics and Diplomacy on Monday. The highlight of the day was paying his tuition in cash. After waiting for almost two hours at the bank, we went back to the school with a huge wad of cash. The largest denomination of Chinese money is a 100 yuan note, which is a little over twelve dollars. We had a stack of several hundred bills and stood in line with dozens of other students paying with similar stacks. I’d only seen so much cash in gangster movies.
After a long day of culture shock, we bought The Simpsons Movie DVD for two dollars and enjoyed American satire chased down by delicious Reeb.
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We arrived at 5:00 in the evening and after adventuring to the grocery store to buy frozen dumplings and two large bottles of Reeb (Shanghai’s own brew…”beer” spelled backwards if you didn’t catch that). We were in bed by 8:00.
Wide awake at 3:00 the next morning, we watched Chinese television, which mostly consists of period-piece soap operas and infomercials for body augmentation pills. There is one English station, which is presented in “Special English,” a simplified version of the language for non-native speakers that consists of simple declarative sentences and monosyllabic vocabulary. Imagine the world news in the form of a Dick and Jane book. Eventually the rest of Shanghai began to awaken and we watched the elderly Chinese neighbors doing Tai Chi with swords in the apartment courtyard and listened to all the men of the neighborhood coughing up their first phlegm of the day.
We spent the day exploring Fudan University where Peter starts taking classes in the English-taught master’s program in Chinese Politics and Diplomacy on Monday. The highlight of the day was paying his tuition in cash. After waiting for almost two hours at the bank, we went back to the school with a huge wad of cash. The largest denomination of Chinese money is a 100 yuan note, which is a little over twelve dollars. We had a stack of several hundred bills and stood in line with dozens of other students paying with similar stacks. I’d only seen so much cash in gangster movies. 
After a long day of culture shock, we bought The Simpsons Movie DVD for two dollars and enjoyed American satire chased down by delicious Reeb.
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