Shanghai

     The first day in china we walked around seeing the sights.  There was a group of 5 people, James, Seth, Drew, Mike, and me.  Our plans were to spend some time in Shanghai then get to Hong Kong to meet the ship there.  If we didn’t make it to Hong Kong in time to get on the ship it would be a disaster.  We spent a long time looking for an Internet café, or any way possible to get online.  We finally found a place.  It was a huge dark room filled with cigarette smoke and rows of computers.  After quite a lot of research we decided on buying flights to Hong Kong.  Once we got that out of the way we could relax and enjoy the few days we had in Shanghai. 
          China is extremely different from Japan.  Comparing to Japan, China was very hectic and unorganized.  It seemed normal for people walking by to shove past, barging into you with their shoulder to get by.  This wouldn’t happen in Japan.  People steer clear from human contact, and have an order to the way they move around each other.  China had a lot more trash floating around the streets.  Japan had virtually no litter, and no trashcans around either.  China had about three trashcans every block yet trash all over the place. 
     We walked down a street filled with little market places selling fake IPods and electronics.  I didn’t buy anything there.  So far in my travels I haven’t bought much at all.  After walking through the markets we turned down this little alleyway lined with people cooking in woks on the street.  Some of the food was very strange looking.  I’m very fortunate not to have any allergies or food restrictions.  I have no idea what that lady was putting in her wok, but I gave her 7 Yuan and devoured it.  It was very good.  They brought us into their little inside room with a few tables and gave us each a beer.  They knew we weren’t from around there and couldn’t drink the water. 
        The traffic was quite hectic.  Riding in cabs was terrifying.  I was constantly nervous our driver was going to run down pedestrians.  Cars would speed around getting extremely close to people trying to cross the street.  There was no order to any of this so people were always in the car’s way just walking in the middle of the street.  I saw a very small old lady crossing the street and a bus sped by her just inches away.  She didn’t even flinch, but I stopped and almost screamed.  I couldn’t believe it.  The busses here were worse than the cars.  They didn’t stop for streetlights or pedestrians, and they go really fast.  All the cabs were little skittle colored VW Jettas, which I thought was very cute yet misleading because they were viciously speeding about.    
        That night our group rented a suit in the middle of Peoples Square in Shanghai.  Split between five people it was only about 15 USD each.  The suit was on the twelfth floor and had a balcony with an amazing view.  We went out to eat and walked around the Bund area.  Unfortunately, most of it was closed down for reconstruction.  At night it was lit up and quite beautiful.  We ran into a group of other Semester at Sea students and had dinner together.  After an eventful night out and about in Shanghai, we made our way back to our suit. 
        The next day we went to walk around the French Concession.  This area was extremely different from anything else I had seen in Shanghai.  The streets and houses reminded me of an area much like Cambridge Mass.  We found a huge park that had everything you could ever want from a park.  Around every corner was something new and exciting.  There was a pond with children playing in it.  The kids had huge floaty toys that resembled plastic hamster wheels.  They would float on the water running inside the large plastic cylinders.  There were also little pedal boats that children were zooming around in.  There was a beautiful walkway with people playing chess and cards on little stone tables.  There was a field with people flying kites of all different kinds.  There was even a section of the park with a merry-go-round.  After spending hours walking around the park we headed back to the ship. 
        That night we went out for dinner and a few drinks at a local bar close by the pier.  The people here were very nice.  They spoke English so it was easier to get to know them.  They kept bringing fireworks out of the back room.  It was around the end of the Chinese new years, and I think they were just shooting off all the fireworks they had left over.  They gave us roman candles to shoot off in the street.  The sidewalk was lined with about twenty people all shooting off roman candles every which way.  It was again, hectic, that seems to be my word for China.  Every time the bartender went into the back room he would come out with a larger colorful box with a wick coming out of the top.  By the end of the night we were shooting off professional sized fireworks right in the middle of the street.  We weren’t the only ones doing this.  You could see and hear fireworks going off up and down the street and in the next streets over too.  We slept on the ship that night, and had a very late morning. 
        The next day we spent looking for our hostel.  This was a long process.  Our hostels name was the Bee Home.  It was a decent one, clean and in a nice area.  The only problem was there was no heat at all.   I barely slept all night, and we woke up very early to catch our flights to Hong Kong.  We took some type of bullet train to Pudong airport.  It was technically an international flight so it took quite a while for us to go through the process of getting our boarding passes.  The flight to Hong Kong was about two and a half hours long.  We were served an in-flight meal and ice cream as well.  We arrived in Hong Kong around noon.  This was two whole days before the ship was to arrive.…