Where The Hell Is Justin?!? (in SHANGHAI!)

(wrote this a couple days after i got back into the states. just never posted it. my b)

Oh and before u read, GO HERE: https://files.nyu.edu/jys259/public/

it's a project i had to do for my infotech class. its a guide to cool coffee/esspresso shops and cafes around the NYU area. (I NEED TO GET PEOPLE TO VISIT THE SITE. SO GO!!)

I’m back! (in the states that is) For those of you who have been following my blog you may have noticed it’s been awhile. Well guess what? Blogspot got blocked! Either I said “communism” too much or Mao just didn’t like the idea of allowing people to speak freely. Oops. Maybe it was both of those. But I can say that now, I’ve left the borders of C(apitalist)ommunist China. Bye Mao! Bye comrades! Bye neon lights!

I’m on the plane now flying from Shanghai to LA. From LA, I have a little bit of a layover and then I get on my flight back home to Phoenix!! I can’t wait, its been far too long since I’ve driven down the 101 while being scorched by leather carseats.

So I guess a little bit of an update is in order. I don’t really remember when I left off. Not having internet on a plane does that to ya. My last few weeks in China have been a decent close to an awesome semester, but I really wish that I had stayed just a week or two longer to see the few things around Shanghai that I wasn’t able to. No closure, you could say.

The last few weeks were pretty much dominated by schoolwork, which kind of sucked. While the three hour classes didn’t help with easing the headaches, they did give me a little bit of extra time. That time was quickly taken away by the three (3) THREE papers I had to write. Maybe being in the business school has turned me away from writing papers, but having to write three (as opposed to having finals for those classes) kind of killed me. Two of the papers had to be at least ten pages and the other one around six. The short one was for my Cultural Currencies class though, and had to compare western and Chinese philosophy. Not fun. Especially when I do exactly the opposite in school. I definitely would have rather taken tests instead.

A few final observations of China:

Neon lights! There must be government regulations on how much each building has to have! Next time you hear the Chinese complain about their limited energy resources, just remember that for every Chinese citizen, there is probably enough neon lights to light a third world country.
Old Chinese people like to walk with their hands folded behind them. They also like to congregate in parks, open fields, Starbucks courtyards, etc… for ballroom dancing. They also do this strange synchronized hitting of themselves. I think it is some form of modern tai chi?
Chinese women would rather die than be seen wearing flat shoes. Boots, stilettos, and heels all the way, even for those ballroom dancing senior citizens.
As the infinitely wise yet totally if-she-were-to-die-right-now-it-wouldn’t-be-the-worst-thing Sarah Palin once said, “its all about job creation!” For every task that we have in America, they have two or three people doing in China. They’ve even created jobs that don’t exist on the other side of the world. (i.e. people who massage your heads while you watch Chinese opera)
An authoritarian government is SO MUCH more efficient than that thing we’ve got in the States. You think a giant plot of land with hundreds of thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses will stop the government from building a giant subway or freeway in its place? Think twice.
It’s all about the contrasts and contradictions. Every luxury brand in the world is in Shanghai in full force, yet you can, almost too easily, buy fake versions of their stuff from any “fake market.” You can buy a full meal from any street vendor for $1 USD, yet you can also buy a $500 cheeseburger. Probably right across the street from each other. Migrant workers who live on almost nothing, walk amongst the countless Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, Lamborghinis, and Maserattis of the ultra-rich.
All of China is a construction site. The sheer scale of it is simply indescribable in words.
China’s undeveloped West has a lot of catching up to do with its developed East.
It is unquestionable that Shanghai will soon become one of the world’s great cities. Or I guess you could say it is reclaiming a spot it used to hold long ago. The Paris of the East is back!

What I will miss:

Café 85 Degrees. Chain of Chinese bakeries open 24 hours with the most delicious pastries in the world! Also amazing cakes and drinks! UGH so good! Also why I now have a layer of fat lining my stomach.
The service. With over a billion people I guess it isn’t too surprising. But any place that provides “service” almost always does it well. Your every need is taken care of. So nice.
All the staff members and professors at NYU Shanghai. They were all awesome and very helpful!
Kumquats and Chinglish
Being of drinking age. But I guess I don’t have too much longer to wait for this one.
Chinese efficiency. Everything is always done quickly and in a fraction of the time it takes to do the same thing in the U.S. Entire subway systems are designed and built in just a few years. You barely have time to get comfortable after you order before your food arrives. When ordering delivery, food is delivered almost instantaneously. Sky scrapers sprout out of the ground like weeds.
The food! So much good stuff that I will probably never be able to find in the U.S. Americans have been fooled when it comes to Chinese food! The stuff in America is nothing like the authentic stuff in China. Fortune cookies are also purely American. Show it to a Chinese person and they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
The flavors of everything. Corn flavored popsicles. Shrimp flavored Pocky. Steak flavored cookies. Etc…

So this blog was created solely for the purpose of keeping a memoir of my semester in China. This may or may not be my last post. Thanks to everyone who read it (yep, all two of you)! 再见！

So this last week was pretty incredible and slightly exhausting. After class on Thursday night I raced to Carrefour to buy some last minute necessities and also some essential snacks for the week long trip. And of course once I get back to my apartment it takes me forever to pack. The next morning we all woke up at some ridiculous time and met at the McDonald's in the Zhongshan Park subway station. This is where I dropped my Egg McMuffin on a table and almost got Meningitis.

Quick summary before the pictures...

From Zhongshan Park we took the subway to the Maglev station which took us directly to Pudong Airport. Our first leg of the trip took us to Chengdu, which is in Sichuan province. They are known for insanely spicy foods, earthquakes, and pandas. We stayed in a hostel (my first ever experience in a hostel) across the street from a "snack street" where they sold all sorts of addictive (and repulsive) delicacies and of course, Starbucks. Little did we know that this would be our last taste of civilization for the rest of the week.

From Chengdu we flew to Lanzhou where we stayed for probably an hour. The only reason we made a stop here is because it was the only way to get to Dunhuang, which we had to get to by an overnight train. Lanzhou is literally a huge city in the middle of nowhere. The airport is at least an hour outside of the city and driving into the city felt like driving through the deserts of Arizona. Nothing in sight for an hour and then suddenly a huge city out of nowhere, completely isolated from the world, appears. I guess this is what they call mirages. Lanzhou is one of those "second-tier" or "third-tier" Chinese cities that no one outside of China has ever heard of (despite their populations of millions). By American standards it would definitely be a large city but by Chinese standards it is probably a village. While no foreigner has ever step foot in the city, KFC was there in full force. Not in the least bit surprised.

I would be lying if I said that I was looking forward to the train from Lanzhou to Dunhuang. Fortunately, thanks to modern Western medicine (aka Sleeping Pills), enough Oreos to feed an entire elementary school, and beds that were surprisingly comfortable, the fourteen hour train ride wasn't bad at all. Actually it felt more like a two hour ride to me. Oops. For the Chinese, it seemed like their drug of choice was baijiu, a Chinese liquor that is both disgusting and amazingly effective. It's also cheaper than water. Coming from a city like Lanzhou, it wasn't too surprising when we found out that we were the only foreigners on the entire train. One of the conductors even came over and wrote our names down. We thought this was for official purposes until we realized she was writing on a piece of tissue. From then on out we saw a steady flow of Chinese people pass by our cabin just to observe us. I imagine this is what the Pandas in Chengdu feel like.

Like Lanzhou, the city that popped out of nowhere, the Dunhuang train station was brand new and probably one of the nicest train stations I have ever seen. China is crazy about this. Plopping down randomly huge and nice things in places that don't seem to belong. In Dunhuang we stayed in a hostel right next to all the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert. We also found a tour that took us into the desert (ON CAMELS!) for a night.

From Dunhuang we went back to Lanzhou (because we had to fly out of there back to Shanghai). We should have known when Vicki's gigantic China guide book didn't even have a sentence on Lanzhou that the city would have absolutely nothing to do. Because of this, foreigners rarely ever visit the city. Everyone in our group (especially the non-Asian ones) got plenty of stares. I could have quite literally built grand stands around Carlos, Steph, Emily, Lara, or Graham (or all five....$$$$) and charged people just to stare at them and people would have paid. So different from Shanghai where foreigners don't even get a second glance.

While in Lanzhou, the city with no tourist attractions, Carlos, Emily and I decided to get massages. We ended up at this place that was an entire skyscraper, actually 10 floors but that counts as a skyscraper in Lanzhou, full of massages and things related. I guess it could be called a bathhouse. Anyways....by far THE sketchiest and most fascinating experience of my life. Carlos and I got asked by one of the employees if we wanted "happy endings" in the locker room, we said NO, and when the people came in to massage us, all three of them looked like prostitutes. Scantily clad. Whatever they did wear was almost completely see-through and did little to hide their bright red underwear. They also had so much makeup on we could barely tell the difference between them. At this point we were thoroughly scared and definitely laughing uncontrollably. "WHAT THE HELL DID WE GET OURSELVES INTO?!" Pretty soon we found out the massages were not the kind we were used to. Even though no "happy endings" were provided, the masseuses sat on us while they massaged us. At one point they also walked on our backs. Afterwards, we were offered food and a bath. We took the food. Said no to the bath. And then we hauled ass back to our hotel to scrub and sanitize every crevice of our bodies that could have possibly come into contact with the masseuses. Oh, and on the way there Emily bought a hot cup of milk tea, and on the cup said, "It is forbidden to use suction tubes to drink hot things". Her thing was hot and she was illegally given a suction tube. Tsk Tsk!

And then we flew back to Shanghai.

A sign on a booth at the snack street in Chengdu. "A bunch of meat" for 5 RMB??? Sold!

Almost everything was ridiculously spicy. I took one bite of these noodles and died.

Lollipops made from pure sugar and molded by hand into animals.

Our hostel in Chengdu. Note to self: get meningitis vaccine ASAP.

They had Western food! Their omelettes had more salt than egg but whatever.

At a "Buddah Theme Park". Emily and Lara acting like fools.

I guess when foreigners do this they're just asking for attention. Oops.

Some stick like object that seemed important.

Couldn't really reach the tummy but hopefully I got some sort of luck.

The mountain was filthy! Quidditch anyone?

Millions of love locks.

The Goblet of Fire.

Waiting in line to see the world's largest Buddah! There was no end to this line.

We found ways to occupy ourselves. See those necklaces? Some lady gave them to us on a shady bus before we got shoved off and into a restaurant.

More line.

Wea HEAH! The World's Largest Buddah! Was it worth the four hours in line and skin that is now ten shades darker? Hmmm...

Chengdu's world famous panda breeding center. This is the place that you read about in newspapers.

Panda Gobstopper.

They were too cute!!! This one sat there happily munching on his bamboo. He was eating when we got there. He was eating hours later when we left. What a life.

Awww!

This is where they had some of the cubs. This one tried to escape by climbing to the top and attempting to squeeze through the bars.

What an attention whore! There were more people taking pictures of this panda than of Britney Spears during her psycho head shaving car bashing days.

Pandas in every shape and size.

Despite my best efforts to kidnap a panda....well just couldn't do it. I settled for a picture next to a picture of one.

Exhibit A: Emily "ABSOLUTELY (did) NOT (use the toilet paper)" Flagg

Another stick like object that seemed worthy of a picture.

The one day I'm not wearing stripes...

These are monks. They probably have better cell phones than you.

Taxi drive from the Lanzhou airport to the Dunhuang train station. Doesn't it look like Arizona??

The inside of the train. I gave this woman an oreo.

Carlos. His hands and arms have become permanently fuzed in that position.

The ridiculously nice train station in Dunhuang.

Where is this? Oh right. NOWHERE.

Vicki was attacked by taxi drivers the minute we walked out of the train station. Me? "umm...I only speak English!" Hehe.

Our hostel next to a sand dune in Dunhuang. The people here were really nice. (as a rule of thumb, the further you travel away from Shanghai, the nicer the people become). It also took this place about two hours to make a meal for us. Lunch? Best order when you're feeling hungry for breakfast.

Cutesicles. Dusty too. Sand will continue to fall out of parts of my body for the rest of my life. Thank you Gobi Desert.

Right out of a travel abroad brochure!

More Arizona.

Caves and Buddahs in Caves. No cameras allowed inside. :(

My new cowboy hat and Emily's new thing.

This is where they filmed Star Wars.

Graham (cracker) on rock.

Jafar and his camels.

I've always wanted to this.

Climbing up our first sand dune!

They even had sleds! They were too fast to handle! *cough*

An oasis in the middle of the desert. This one had a lake in the shape of a moon. "Crescent Lake" Somebody told me that it is shrinking and will disappear soon.

This is what happens when college students are told to point at camel toe. (look at steph)

Thats my camel getting up in Carlos' business. Carlos was a ruthless despot and refused to pet him.

This is my camel. I named him Toe. He was going through a phase in life, thus the baldness and lopsided humps. "You are Beautiful NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY..."