China

Want to know what i miss the most? COLD DRINKS! I've had more warm beer here than ever in my life. water too! Amanda knows I love my ice water, but here it's generally room temperature!

The pollution in Shanghai is nothing compared to Beijing - you can probably see that in my pictures. Good luck to all those Olympic athletes -- I nearly died going up some stairs let alone actually working out. I've used that as my excuse for not working out at all.

The food has been amazing. There are days we all crave cheese burgers and fries, but generally we have great Chinese meals every day... and cheap!! I'm pretty good with chopsticks now. I think I've eaten every meal with them -- practice makes perfect I guess.

I generally feel very safe here. Walking around in the city back home at night can sometime be nerve racking, but here I am almost always at ease. Everyone is so friendly.

The language barrier hasn't been too much of a problem. The school gave us some sheets with local restaurants written in English and Chinese. We get into the cab, point at the one we want to go to and we're off. Restaurants generally have an English version of the menu so we point at what we want. Works well usually!

Today was the last full day with our Cheong Kong students so we needed to be productive. We met at 10 AM to head out and complete the rest of our 70 surveys (we had 30 completed over the weekend). Everything here seems to move a lot more slowly than we’re used to – people just don’t have the same sense of urgency as us Americans. It can be frustrating, but there’s little we can do. So we met at 10, but didn’t actually start any surveys until after 1:00 PM! We split into 2 groups and managed to do 35 surveys all day – a bit lower than our goal of 70. We’ve given up though – too difficult.

To do the surveys we visited an IT or Digital Mall. An interesting concept – there are just tons of little shops each selling 1 or 2 brands exclusively where you can bargain and get things for roughly 20% less than a normal electronics retailer. The one we visited had 3 or 4 floors of shops crowded with people and a food court – a great place for surveys. Unfortunately the management didn’t agree. After about 10 surveys, we started to attract their attention. Before we knew it there were 4 of them surrounding us with walkie talkies asking us to leave. They even said something “not very friendly” according to our Cheong Kong student. Unfortunately, she wasn’t willing to elaborate – we have a feeling it was something bad about the Americans!

The rest of the day was spent doing secondary research. Things are coming together nicely – we’re all feeling a little better about having something together for Thursday’s presentation to the Polaroid executives. It was a long day though – class discussion started at 9 and I’m just now (10 PM) getting back to my room!

Sunday didn’t go exactly as planned. We need to complete at least 100 surveys but we’re finding it rather difficult so Lindsay and I decided to meet up with one of our Cheong Kong students to try to complete some. We figured we’d go for a few hours and then have the rest of the afternoon to do some additional touring. We met Eric at 10 AM and ended up spending the entire day (back at 5 PM) and only accomplished 19 completed surveys. What a frustrating way to spend a day we were supposed to have free! Plus our other group members were out having fun. It was fun to spend the day with Eric, but not exactly what we had planned.

In the evening, we met up with some other students and went for dinner at an Indian restaurant. It was excellent food – nice to have something other than Chinese. Afterwards, we walked down to a bar where they had pitchers of beer for $3 and outside seating. We spent a few hours there and then headed for home. Overall, a good night, but somewhat uneventful.

More from Shanghai

Nanjing pictures

With the weekend off, we decided to take a train to nearby Nanjing. Nanjing was the capital of China before it was moved to Beijing so there is a lot of history in the city. We went by train leaving our hotel at 6:45 AM and returning at 11:00 PM. The trip was approximately 2 hours and the train accommodations were better than I expected. The train went between 150 km/hour and 250 km/hour depending on the distance to the next stop. That’s roughly 100-150 mph.

While in Nanjing, we visited the Presidential Palace and the Ming Tombs (yes, more Ming Tombs since some were buried in Nanjing before the capital was moved to Beijing). There were 10 of us so we needed 3 taxis. This caused us to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where each taxi let people out at. We wasted quite a bit of time allowing us to only really see 2 attractions. We did, of course, leave plenty of time for eating. We had 2 rather large meals. We quickly learned that Nanjing is far cheaper than anywhere we’ve been. The meals were 30 RMB each ($4) and you could get a bottle of water for 1 RMB (14 cents) although the average water cost 3 RMB (43 cents).

It was incredibly hot today. 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees F) and not a hint of wind! I don’t remember the last time I sweated that much. We were all happy to be home and jump in the shower! Tomorrow is a more relaxing day with a little group work for our project in the morning and then touring some more around Shanghai.

Check out my pictures from the trip.