Laowai

We’ve started our second week in Shanghai. We have a few routines and everything seems simple when you have two bowls, two plates, 4 pairs of pants, etc. In the morning I mix up two little cups of tang with a chop stick. We usually have a little fruit for breakfast and I have to wash it with a special fruit and veggie soap. Then we have some cereal and Brian sometimes makes a coffee in his French press.

Brian usually goes to meet with his co-worker around 8:00 or 9:00 am and I clean up a bit and do a bunch of reading. Sometimes I put on the TV – we only get a couple english channels: Cinemax, CCTV which is a China sponsored english news station and then anther channel that has old english movies sometimes and the rest of the time it shows Chinese cartoons or sumo wrestling.

I should go out for a walk more often but I don’t really feel like braving the dangerous and dirty streets. We walked to the Fuxing park yesterday which is a nice big park in the old French area. If we were closer to the park I would go there often but it is a long walk through the smelly streets and I get stared at so it’s not something I feel in the mood to do.

Over the weekend we tried to do some homey things. Everywhere we went it was extremely crowded and busy with people. We went to Ikea on Saturday. It’s pretty much the same as in the US. But is was interetsting to walk around anyway and we ate western-style food in their restaurant.

We found a Starbucks near our apartment. Brian likes to work there – just to have a change of pace and get out of our place.

The Ikea was near the Shanghai sports stadium and so we wandered around the stadium for a while. The Shangai Games were starting that day and these people looked like they were practicing for something like an opening ceremony.

Saturday night we ordered pizza and watched a DVD that we had purchased at a little hole-in-the-wall near Ikea. The pizza wasn’t too bad and it felt good to stay in for the evening instead of the usual meal routine that involves finding a restaurant in our little guide book, hoping we can communicate the address to a taxi driver and then taking a 10 to 15 minute taxi ride through the exhaust filled streets.

On Sunday we went to a big grocery store called Carrefour. It’s a French chain and we heard it was supposed to have lots of western-style food. We did find the groceries we were looking for but it was very tiring because of the huge crowd. I thought Meijers in Midland on a weekend was bad. The crowds here in China don’t have the same courtesy that you find in the States. People don’t mind walking right in front of you and then stopping in the middle of and aisle or bumping into you or cutting you off. We decided we don’t really need to go there again – we can get most of the things we found at a local grocery store. Here are a couple pictures. Brian was about to lose it while we were waiting in line. We’ll never complain about our local Evanston grocery being busy again.

I made spaghetti for dinner Sunday night – even though it was a really plain meal it tasted good. We always think that we like to get out and experience the local flavor of places but this weekend we just felt like doing things that were familiar to us. Tomorrow some more ZS people will arrive from the US so we will be eating plenty of Chinese food with them.