Week 2: What Happened To Week 1?

If you're why wondering this is week 2, it's because I kept a week's worth of entries while I waited for a way to route China's censors. Luckily (or unluckily) Berkeley's Virtual Private Network did work, so here I am, a week behind on entries. A friend advised that I not put everything up at once, so I've decided to do double entries--one for the day of the entry, and the other an entry from the previous week. Hopefully this means "tl:dr" isn't an excuse :P.

I suppose I should start with today. The only thing I have to say is "Shanghai is amazing". I have been already been wowed twice in two days by the city, especially at night. They really seem to like their lights here. They have small McDonald's booths in the park that only sell ice cream, and really fancy Pizza Huts are like upscale CPKs, On the other hand, Shanghai girls are defnitely overrated, the internet here is laggy and somewhat unreliable, and I do somewhat miss the presence of familiars. Anyways, tired now. Think I will go to sleep--might upload some pictures in the morning.

P.S. As promised:

Day 1

To most of your reliefs (or perhaps for the majority of you, chagrin) I had a safe and boring journey across the Pacific. On the way I slept like a koala (or panda, or whichever cute creature you’d prefer to associate with copious sleep), pondered why our flight path was an arc instead of a straight line (until my roommate’s—Ray’s—voice started ringing in my head about non-Euclidian space), and realized that even if Sarah Palin’s house were not in Wasilla or Juneau, but at the westernmost tip of Alaska, she would still not be able “to see Russia from [her] house”, much less Putin rearing his ugly evil head.

I suppose beyond that, I might as well give some first impressions.

Beijing International is shiny—my mother complained that it was too shiny. Meanwhile I could only ponder the trivial matters; for example, if the eye burning shine was really that necessary to impress would be tourists, or how much it cost to keep it shining bright enough to make UCLA and the Star of Jesus look like the ghetto in a dark damp night. The real question to ponder though is, if Beijing International is this shiny, just how shiny is Shanghai?

When I heard they were going to take our temperatures at Customs, I imagined long crowded lines with two Chinese bureaucrats sticking thermometers in each and every mouth that walked by (sucks to be a Siamese Twin). Actually, they set up an infrared camera that beeped when a person with an elevated temperature passed by. It was really quite ingenious. I wish I could have taken a picture of it, but it would have been very awkward looking for a camera in front of an infrared camera right next to a Custom’s officer. Besides they would’ve probably tackled and arrested me as an enemy of the state…or a Canadian spy.

There Are Some Things We Don’t Miss Till they’re gone Part 1: When Everyone Speaks the Same

I’m sure this will be a recurring theme in the next 4 months, but don’t be disappointed if it isn’t :P. You never quite realize how useful it is to have everyone speak fluently the same first language as you. To be honest, I felt a bit like a stranger, with everyone around me firing away in rapid Chinese. It was especially troublesome when we needed to look for people, and I was reluctant to ask for help because I didn’t want them to know my Chinese sucked.

There Are Some Things We Don’t Miss Till They’re Gone Part 2: When Everyone Looks the Same

You never quite appreciate how easy it is to find Asian people when there are so few of us in the US. I swear I would have mistaken at least 3 people to be my mother if I had not known what she was wearing. That number’s at least double for my uncle, who was supposed to pick us up (consequently he went to the wrong terminal). There are so many Asian people here you can literally find several lookalikes for any appearance. Back in the US, even similar looking people look really different. Of course, there are certain groups that I am excluding in this, for which I will not specify. (If you know what I refer to you’d know why)

...Speaking of which, I just saw a crowd of Korean students wearing SARs masks.

Anyways, my Uncle just found us. Till next time.