Adventures in Shanghai

Sorry that it has taken me so long to write, I have been in Shanghai for the weekend attending district conference.  I would have written sooner but the beginning of this week has been pretty busy.  Luckily I have three days of school off to get caught back up.

 

I started attending my CS classes this last week.  Overall they are just like the ones in the US, and so far I am not having any problem understanding what the teachers are saying which is a really good thing.  I have decided on who my Chinese student who lives with me is.  His name is Shen Dayu.  He is a second year graduate student in CS.  He is researching computer security, so very close to the area that I was researching myself.

I also went to the gym on Monday.  It was really good to be able to lift some weights again.  I won’t really be able to go consistently till next week, but after that I am going to really enjoy going.  There is also a pool at the gym, so I will be able to do a lot more swimming which will be just wonderful for me.

For FHE evening that night I went over to one of the other flagship students houses and just hang out with them.  It really is good being around others.

 

On Tuesday the craziness of class in China hit for the first time.  In China they will change the time and place of a class without publicly posting this information.  I went to my abstract algebra class to find that there was an entirely different class in that room.  It took me till Friday before I was able to find out the new information about the class.  At night I watched a movie called 建国大业.  It was a movie about the communist revolution, it was actually done really well.

 

On Wednesday I went to do service at the school again, but this time we took the bus.  It actually turned out to work really well, the bus system in Nanjing is very impressive.  The only problem is that after we got off the buss the path we needed to walk was literally covered in 3 inches of poo.  It was rather nasty.  We ended up walking on the freeway to avoid that particular road.  All in all an interesting way to get to service.

Service went really well, I had Lars and Spring from the flagship program to help me this time.  From now on we will be teaching 3rd year students which means we are the first intro into English that they have ever had.  At the end of class they all came up and had us sign there books.  It was really cute.

For dinner everyone went to Aaron and Crystal’s house for dinner.  There we had psuedo-Mexican.  Crystal cooked up some 抓并 and then we put rice on them.  It actually tasted really good, just not like the rice filled tortilla taste we were going for.

 

Thursday didn’t have too much interesting happen.  I did get my tickets for Shangai, and I had a really good papaya shake, and a really great dinner with my roommate.

 

Friday was the grand trip to Shanghai.  We headed off to the train station and got on one of the really fast trains.  The train gets up to 200 MPH so we were there in just an hour.  It was a really nice way to travel, we should get some of these in America.  Shanghai is just amazing, it reminded me so much of Taiwan.  At first I was starting to doubt if Taiwan was really nice as I was remembering, but Shanghai proved to me that it was.  Shanghai and Taiwan share a lot of the same chain stores so in some ways it was just like being home in Taiwan again.  They even have a lot of the foods that I had been missing.

In Shanghai we first went to the peoples park.  The coolest parts there were hearing an old man play a Chinese version of the flute, and some really cool sculptures that people had done in the park.  We eventually made our way to the river front in Shanghai, which is apparently in all the movies.  It really is a pretty cool skyline.  We went to dinner so that we could also get some good night shots.  At night we took some really sweet pictures and were also mobbed by Chinese girls for photo ops.  It was all really cute.

We finished the night by first going to an underground market.  There was a lot of really cheap stuff there and I was able to help some people haggle to get even better prices.  Lastly we went to a not-quite-good night market.  It was a little disappointing way to end the day, but nonetheless it was a good day overall.

 

 

The hotel we stayed in was rather small, me and Trevor only had a precious few inches between the two of us.  It was also really expensive.  Everything is pretty cheap in Shanghai, except for housing which is ridiculously priced.

 

Saturday started with me sleeping till around noon.  The night before me and Trevor had talked till about 3:30 AM so I was pretty tired.  We woke up and got some amazing Taiwan style breakfast.  It made me extremely happy.  In the afternoon we had district conference which was really good.  At night we headed to Papa John’s for dinner.  Normally I like to eat Chinese food, but one of the group was having some stomach problems so we went somewhere a little more American.  It was good if pricy.

 

I will finish up the rest of the Shanghai trip, which isn’t much, on the next blog post.  As for my spiritual thoughts this week, it all had to do about being married.  This was both the subject of an Elder Scott CES talk I watched this week, as well as a several talks in the district conference.  What was repeated over and over was how couples need to constantly show love to each other.  They should do something everyday to let the other side know just how much they love them.

I was thinking how I was to go about building such a habit now, and I can not say that I am totally sure, but nonetheless I will try.  Maybe before we are married we could try doing this same thing with those that are around us, especially are family.  I know that we all show love for our family, but do we do it as often as we should?  We could probably all do a lot better if we tried to daily say something nice to at least one of our family members.