Migrant School and Shanghai

We went to the migrant school Thursday afternoon and had to teach the kids for about an hour. Our group taught them "I'm a Little Teapot" and played hangman. We also tried to play this game outside, but that kind of failed. We were told the kids would be 8 to 10 years old, it is a primary school after all, but some claimed to be as old as like 14 or 15.

It was to be expected, kind of chaotic. At the start they were really well behaved, but "I'm a Little Teapot" definitely started to lose them. The school building was supposedly only a few years old, but certainly didn't look that way. I guess most of the kids there were from Anhui and Jiangsu (outside Nanjing) province. They proclaimed proudly how many students had graduated and gone on to middle school recently. I can't remember the exact numbers, but if that's something to be proud of, I wonder what a really bad school is like.

Right after that, I went to Shanghai with Jim, Tim, and (Dan) Butters. Jim was in the program last semester too, and his family had moved to Shanghai from Rochester when he was 10 years old. That said, we stayed at his family's apartment in a compound about a 45 minute ride west from the train station. Got there at like 10, ate leftover lasagna, played with his awesome British bulldog (which involved a marshmallow gun), played Xbox and were asleep by like 12:30.

The next day I woke up, put my suit on, printed off my resume and clips and headed toward the Jing'an Temple area closer to the center of the city for my internship interview. The guy was an hour late because he had to run out for something. Should know about the internship sometime this week. Met up with a large group of CIEE people who had arrived Friday afternoon. We went to a cheap noodle restaurant suggested by Jim's mom (who works for this expat guide/phone service thing). Then walked to the Bund to go to a bar called I Heart Shanghai. It was pretty dead so after one drink, we went to a bar called Mural, which had some "all you can drink for 100 kuai" thing. Not too exciting, met up with Jim/Tim and some of his friends, street food after. I would learn that night and the next night "open bar" also means watered down alcohol, which was pretty gross and led to me drinking beer. I end up sleeping on the floor in the CIEE hotel room with 6 other guys, Jim's place was an inconvenient taxi ride away.

Saturday, woke up showered and put my suit back on. We grabbed breakfast at the City Diner (banana pancakes) and in the afternoon went to the Shanghai Museum. The weather was great and we had to wait like 45 minutes to get in. The minority culture, currency, and sculpture exhibits were amazing. Around 5, finally made it back to Jim's to clean my self up and bring my stuff back to the hotel. For dinner, we went out to a Xinjiang restaurant and ordered what was probably a half to a quarter of lamb (we had pre-ordered a whole one but shown up late and they had already sold part of it). Still it was a TON of meat. They gave us gloves and we pretty much just dug in to a pile of roasted lamb, biting the meat away from the fat. It was pretty awesome. Had other dishes too, but most everything had lamb in it. Ping Ping and friends who live in Shanghai also came.

Then, we went to a club called Bon Bon for an all-you-can-drink thing for Lynn in our programs birthday. 120 kuai for guys, 80 for girls. We all had a shot of tequila for her birthday, which they interpreted as pouring half a glass out. Turns out, because it's watered down, probably was equivalent to a shot, just even more disgusting than normal tequila. So after that mostly drank the warm beer they had. Gotta make money somehow I guess. There was no place to sit, so we pretty much danced for the entire time from 10 to like 1:30 or 2 when we left. It was a pretty big place, had a hip-hop dance room and a techno dance room.

The next day, we went to an amazing restaurant called Element Fresh for brunch. I'd been there twice before, it pretty much serves really fresh, yuppie diner food to yuppies. Really good though, had an omlette, steak, fruit, toast, potatoes for 68 kuai. We ate outside in the sun since it was warm out and it was easily the most relaxing thing I've done in weeks. Caught the train back at 2:30 and studied.

Other than that, we went to an Irish-style Pub in the Sheraton Hotel for Saint Patty's Day. A normal Guinness cost as much as my Element Fresh meal, thank god we negotiated them down to 35 kuai since we were in a group. Seemed to be a lot of 40+ British dudes, I didn't know the British celebrated the holiday.