Golden Week

We're midway through October and that means that I've been here in China for nearly a month and a half now. Here we are, more than a third of the way through the semester, and I am met with a semi-paradoxical feeling that I am sure many former exchange students can relate to; it seems that I have experienced so much -- that almost every day here has been marked by something completely new and immensely exciting -- and yet it is crystal clear, by the end of my three and a half months, there will still be so much more that I want to see/do/taste/talk about/etc... It's like taking a vacation to Disney World for a week. You can buy all the fast passes, sprint from park to park all day, ride as many rides and hug as many characters as humanly possible, and yet, at the end of the week, there will still be so much you never got to.

Now multiply that by about a million, and you've got how I feel about my time in China. Because, as I've come to learn, China's a little bigger than Disney World.

Speaking of vacations, China kicks off the month of October with Golden Week: a week-long national holiday beginning on October 1st -- the day when, in 1939, Mao Zedong raised the first Communist Chinese flag, inaugurating the People's Republic of China. The start of the national holiday fell on a Thursday here in China, so my classmates and I got to celebrate our one-month survival in China with a ten day break from classes. Thanks, Mao.

Part 1: Shanghai

Golden Week is the largest tourism week of the year for the Chinese, so two of my friends -- Amy and Sophie* -- and I wanted to fit our big travel plans in the early part of the break to avoid the heaviest tourist traffic. So last Thursday, we kicked off our vacation by hopping on a bullet train to Shanghai.

First of all, bullet trains are awesome. It took us a little over an hour and a half to get from Nanjing to Shanghai and that was with multiple stops in between. The cars were surprisingly roomy even for a giraffe like myself and the ride was exceptionally smooth. Very easy to nap in and this was all in the regular-class seating, so it was affordable too. Upon arrival, we hailed a cab and began our scenic pilgrimage to our hotel on the other side of the Huangpu River.

Now I can begin to tell you about the luckiest hotel booking I have ever been a part of. I will admit, we weren't exactly proactive in our planning of this Shanghai excursion. It wasn't until Tuesday, two days before we left, that we actually got around to booking a room. Here, I will give credit where credit is due; the aforementioned Sophie Arline Jones Googled "hotels in Shanghai", clicked on the first link, and -- once again championing the power of simplicity -- booked the first listed room. We did do some other poking around, but this place was fairly close to downtown and apparently on sale so we ended up paying about as much as you'd pay at a high-end Motel 6 here in the States. Plus, an extra five bucks got us free breakfast. We didn't expect much, but we knew we had a place to stay for the next three days.

So for a moment, put yourself in our shoes. After about fifteen minutes of darting through Shanghai traffic, our taxi pulls up to the "Dorsett Shanghai". None of us have heard of the Dorsett line of hotels, but it looks like a nice place from the outside. Tall building. Bakery around the corner. We walk through the front doors...

"Wow. Look at that chandelier."

"It smells really nice in here."

"...Are we in the right place?"

Long story short, somehow we had managed to book a four-star hotel for a bargain-basement price two days before we arrived. They must have needed to fill the empty rooms and we found the right place at the right time. Even on the third floor, we had a balcony view of the adjacent Century Park and, beyond that, the Shanghai skyline. Two luxurious extra-long twin beds, a flat-screen TV, a full sized bathtub/shower -- it might not have been all that much, but for three college kids, it felt like the Ritz-Carlton.

Luxury

Now, we were only there for three days so we didn't get to hit many of the major tourist attractions, but we spent a lot of our time downtown immersing ourselves in the fast-paced commercial lifestyle of Shanghai. It's significantly more international than Nanjing and I saw many more foreigners walking around. Additionally, noticeably more people spoke at least a little bit of English. It's always a little embarrassing when I start to ask for something in my broken Chinese and the employee/stranger cuts me off and answers my question in fluent English.

Assorted Highlights of the Trip:

• I got my haircut for the first time since I came to China and it was a wonderful experience. For about $20 they washed, cut, and styled my hair and gave me a 15 minute shoulder massage which is apparently a standard perk at most Chinese hair salons.
• There was a huge fireworks show in Century Park the last night we were there which, of course, we had a perfect view of from our hotel room balcony.
• After the fireworks show, on a whim, Sophie and I decided to check out the Cloud 9 restaurant while Amy met up with some friends from home. Located on the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower (home to the Grand Marriot Shanghai Hotel), the restaurant has a 360 degree view of the city and pretty delicious food. Also, they had a roaming magician named Edward who gave us a legitimately stunning 15 minute personal magic show.

The Jin Mao Tower is the smaller pointy building.

After just three days, it was a hard place to leave, and I certainly hope to visit Shanghai many more times in the future.

Part 2: Yangzhou...?

After we got back from Shanghai, I got one night's rest before I packed up again and hopped in the car with my host family on a trip to Yangzhou. Now you have exactly as much information about the trip as I had when I got in the car that Monday morning. They told me we were going to Yangzhou for two days and that was about it. As I soon found out, this was a very different trip than the one I had just been on.

First of all, I had assumed that the trip would only consist of me, my host brother, and my host parents (Jerry, Ayi & Shushu). Turns out this was a 17-person (and 1 dog) trip, made up of numerous family friends that I had never met before. There were a couple of younger kids among the other families so I had some fun playing around with them, much to the amusement of their parents.

Your reward for surviving the zip-line is this walk back.

Our caravan made its way about two hours to the east...At least, I thought we were going East because that's where Yangzhou is and when I asked Jerry where we were going he replied Yangzhou. But Yangzhou is a big city in Jiangsu Province and after an hour of driving we were in the middle of absolute nowhere, with rice fields all around us. Finally, we pulled up to this random hotel complex nestled up against a lake and I was told that we would be staying here for the night, but first, we were going to walk down the street to go to an "amusement park."

Now I use the term "amusement park" lightly because, well, this was not your standard, westernized Six Flags-style amusement park. Instead, imagine a large fair ground where about half of the buildings are still being built -- and I mean men placing beams and hammering nails next to you as you walk down the main drag -- and the marquee attraction is a rusty zip-line across a small section of the lake.

Other Featured Attractions:

• Archery (your ticket got you 8 arrows to shoot at a couple of targets with minimal supervision)
• Outdoor laser-tag
• The "Roll-Down-the-Hill-in-a-Cart-Thingy" ride
• Floating bounce houses



totally safe things going on here

• And MUCH MORE!!! (not really)

What made this experience even more hilarious was that, out in the middle of nowhere (I'm honestly not confident that we were anywhere near where I thought we were going), I was basically the only foreigner. I can remember seeing one other older white man and that was it. What you have to understand is that these people almost never see westerners let alone Americans. It's like seeing a zebra in the woods in Vermont. Needless to say, I was turning some heads. While this phenomenon was at an extreme at the park, it frequently happens in Nanjing too and I'll definitely talk about that in more depth soon.

We only stayed at the resort until the next afternoon and then we got back in the car and headed home, which I was thankful for because I was absolutely exhausted from six straight days of hardcore vacationing. Yeah, I know, my life is really difficult. Jerry was also pretty amusing during the trip because he was exhibiting all the traits of your typical 16-year old boy on a family vacation: constant complaining, complete disdain for our vacation spot, unrelenting desire for his home/regular food/friends. I can confirm, puberty occurs in all cultures.

Part 3: Purple Mountain / Laziness

The rest of my vacation week was marked by a lot of rain here in Nanjing so I spent a considerable amount of time catching up on sleep, doing homework, and watching movies; however, on Friday, the skies cleared and -- along with a handful of fellow study-abroaders -- I hiked Purple Mountain which is a large, but easily scaled mountain bordering Nanjing. It was a beautiful day for a hike and the trek provided a suitable bookend to a tremendous vacation week here in China. As I said earlier, it also marked the end of the first third of my time here in China and I find myself particularly reflective as I think about the milestones that I've reached already.

It was a hazy (that's China) but still impressive view.

When I left the United States, I didn't fool myself into thinking that I knew what I was getting myself into. I couldn't imagine what this new world would be like, so I didn't really try.

Now, not only do I know that I never could have predicted any of my time here; but also, I could never have fathomed the immense volume of experiences that continue to fill every moment. I am surprised and amazed day after day.

To use yet another metaphor; when I began this trip, I looked at China like a big dark cave -- massive and mysterious, but all I could really see was just the one opening, looming ahead of me. Only now that I have entered the cave can I see that there are thousands upon thousands of other unknown paths to take, caves within caves, more paths to travel than anyone could ever traverse in a thousand lifetimes.

If I were to summarize what I thought was the most significant thing I've taken away from this first month in China, it would probably be something like this:

For each new discovery I make here in China, I am exposed to a dozen more new things that I have yet to explore. It's as if this bank of information available to me is increasing at a faster rate than I can learn from it. And the more I learn, the more I feel as if I know almost nothing at all. It makes me feel small, but not insignificant. On the contrary, this phenomenon only seems to add significance to not just myself, but everything around me.

I'm already a dedicated lobbyist for study-abroad programs because I see now how traveling outside of your native country forces you to appreciate the lives of those who are, in some ways, completely different than you. And yet, I continually find that Chinese and Americans are strikingly similar in many more aspects than I initially expected.

Plus, when you get to adventure around a giant, fascinating new world with people you care about and genuinely enjoy being with, none of it really feels like school at all.

It's all just one big vacation.

Fun Stories and Facts!

• While riding in a taxi to the train station in Nanjing, our taxi driver got cut off by a man who I think was on his phone. Our driver responded by cutting back in front of him, stopping in the middle of the highway, cornering the other car up against the divider when it tried to re-pass us, and then shouting at the other driver from our stopped car for about five seconds...
• Our hotel bathroom had a mirror that was heated so that it would never fog up even after we showered. Sometimes it's the little things, people.
• Immediately after my hair stylist cut my hair, I mimed to him that I usually styled it up rather than straight across. He took out some white cream which I assumed was normal hair gel. I pointed and said I wanted that and he repeated "bai se" (which means "white") to me multiple times. Thinking he was making sure I wanted the white hair gel, I said yes, do it. A few seconds later my hair was literally white and I walked around Shanghai with a white mohawk for the next few hours. Unfortunately for the internet, it all came out when I showered.

* It's fair to assume that whenever I talk about doing something/going somewhere interesting here in China, at least one of these dorfs is with me. Everybody needs a crew.

Amy & Sophie