Just Arrived

So I have made it to Shanghai!

To get here I flew Brisbane to Sydney (about 1 hr) and then Sydney to Shanghai (about 10 hours). I made friends with the flight attendant, and the guy next to me flirted with her and got her number. She gave us fruit and we talked a lot. I will probably hang out with her when she's in Shanghai next. I landed about 8:30 PM and Tian Jing (host sister from SYA) was there to meet me, angel that she is. She helped me get my things to my apartment.

My apartment is really nice, it has a study, which must be about 7'x10', a kitchen, an entryway/dining room/hallway which is about 8'x10', and a largeish bedroom which must be about 16' square, and the classic Chinese sunporch/closet for drying clothes. Why they couldn't have made the bedroom smaller and the bathroom larger, I don't know....it is a lot of space for just me, but hopefully I will have people over often enough to be able to make good use of it.

I've learned a lot about the guy who lives here from the things he has left behind. From his DVD collection I have learned that he is gay (he has Will and Grace, Scrubs, Queer as Folk, and a large collection of musicals and art films), from his sunporch I have learned that he is tall (I need to buy a stool to be able to reach the hanging wires semi-comfortably), from the drawer in the kitchen I have learned that he smokes, and from the kitchen itself I have learned that he doesn't cook much (he has a knife still in its casing on his counter, his wok looks completely unused, and he had no mixing bowls nor any sort of cooking spoon). He also is not a tea person, as he has no teapot. I feel like Nancy Drew.

Shanghai is HOT. Shanghai is HUMID. I am so thankful for the air-con in my house. I wish I never had to go outside while here. I have been sweating like a pig and it is disgusting. According to weather.com, right now (10:30 PM) it is 90 F, but with 66% humidity feels like 102. It actually isn't any different from what it was during the day. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, which will cool things down during the day, but not exactly keep the humidity down. Small comfort is that the average temperature stays around this for the rest of the summer, so at least it shouldn't get much worse. And the subway is air-conditioned.

In other news I got a new cell phone number (one of the many things I did today). It's +86 136 3655 9611, and if you get the sudden urge to call just please make sure that you've got the time zones right. Some of the other things I did today were to go and buy things for the apartment, like paper towels, frozen dumplings, sugar, rice, oil, vinegar, laundry items, a good knife, a mixing bowl for the kitchen, etc. I did a load of laundry, very exciting as I had no clean clothes left after tour, I figured out how to say 'bleach' in Chinese, I had lunch with the other interns at McKinsey, which was really fun. They're a great group of people, very international mix with everyone having lived in at least two countries at some point in time, and everyone is just as confused about what's actually going on in terms of the internship. We're all really confused about what we're actually up to at this job, but we hope to find out tomorrow on the first day of work. So we spent about four hours hanging out and chatting and that was good. Otherwise I spent the day going around shopping and searching for a grocery store. I have everything I need in the kitchen except for fresh vegetables, which I hope to remedy tomorrow, as since I got internet hooked up (harder than I thought it would be, I needed to configure a PPPoE or something like that, which wasn't obvious), I looked up where some good supermarkets are and discovered that had I walked one more block yesterday I would have gotten to one, but what can you do...nobody would tell me where one was, I asked around a lot. Did I mention that Shanghai is a fair bit more expensive than the rest of China? I am totally thrown off in haggling because i no longer have a clue as to how much I should be paying for things.

So that's what is happening in my life. I'm working on getting pictures of Australia up on Facebook, I just redid the Sydney album so that it has all my sydney photos instead of just some of them. Here's the link.

So that's a pretty good summary of my life in Shanghai, feel free to forward this on to anyone you think might care.

And last, a little information on contacting me. I'm getting some heavy-duty skype stuff so that I can contact people in America and you guys can contact me. So I can call out whenever I feel like it or you can call me at (312)235-2009. It will go to my computer and if i'm around I'll answer, if I'm not you can leave me a voicemail. Or if you have skype you can find me under the screen name brightwinds. Pretty cool, huh? So give it a try since I'll be around a lot without company.

Best,
Jenny