Day Three: Orientation

The day started off with a group trip to the famous Shanghai Bund- the area where a river divides old, colonial Shanghai from new, modern Shanghai. Personally, I thought the architecture on the colonial side was more beautiful (albeit, built with Opium money) even though Shanghai is most famous for the new city which was entirely built in the past twenty years. Lunch as a group was delish, same place my roomies and I ate last night for dinner because there are only two restaurants open remotely near campus due to Spring Festival. Then some of us walked to the closest fruit stand-I am still getting used to Shanghai being generally more expensive than Beijing...my fruit (and almost everything else) costs about double the Beijing price, even the subway!! We followed this up with another orientation meeting about how awesome it would be to end up in Chinese jail...or maybe it was the other way around. After dinner on our own we got to go to a Chinese acrobatic performance in the Shanghai Center (a really, really, really, really swanky building with expensive stores and men in expensive suits and women in gorgeous heels). The acrobats were UNBELIEVABLY impressive, but the show in general was very gimmicky. The colors, music, backdrops were all reminiscent of a preschool playground. That bothered me a little but not enough to think the acrobats were mediocre in anyway. The show ended about 9:00pm and almos the entire group of Alliance Fudan students went clubbing afterwards. Since we have such a small group it makes it infinitely more possible to do group activities that include everyone, which was really great! Even Yan Ran came!!!! The club was ridiculously expensive, but recommended by another foreigner we met at a bar. She said Maya (the name of the club) was really popular amongst locals rather than foreigners (the first place we went was entirely foreigners), so that was nice. When in China, do as the Chinese!! Overall a great day!!!