Today started off really well with a field trip to the Shanghai Museum of Arts and Crafts. My group got there early so Kara and I walked down the street and found some delicious baozi for breakfast, which really hit the spot. Weiqi told us it was a special kind of baozi, which was why it tasted so good. After our quick breakfast stop, we met up with the rest of our group and headed into the museum. The stuff they had there all turned out to be really amazing and we even got to see some Jade being carved right in front of us. We also got a calligraphy t-shirt made that had a giant panda on it and then in characters said kung fu panda on the front and then the translation of Purdue on the back. We are going to learn a Chinese card game in class and the winner will get the shirt. We also got to see this lady do this paper art, which I never thought was all that cool until I saw it in action. She can do these amazingly intricate designs in a matter of minutes and she literally wastes no part of the paper. We got three different designs from her including a commoner’s dragon, and will also fight for those via the Chinese card game.
After we finished up at the museum we headed back to our rooms with an extra hour to cram for our Chinese final. We walked into the final not really knowing what to expect and our teacher split us into 5 groups and gave us each a 30-minute time slot to take the exam. She then handed us the exam and we had 15 minutes to make any notes on it. It had one section where you had to pronounce 10 words correctly, another with 10 sentences of characters you had to read aloud, and a section with 3 topics to choose from to come up with a paragraph of at least 8 sentences to read aloud. I can honestly say those were the fastest 15 minutes of my life. I didn’t even look at the pronunciation section, and didn’t write anything down for the paragraph because the topics were in characters that I didn’t recognize. I spent the whole time decoding the sentences and only managed to get 3 of them fully figured out. She then told us to come back at our designated time and we would read aloud our answers with our group. A few people, including myself, snapped pictures of the exam on the way out and we spent our extra time figuring out all of the sentences of characters we didn’t know. I realized I knew how to pronounce all of the words and one of the paragraph options was to talk about your family, which I could do off the top of my head so I was good to go. We got to our time slot early and she even let us make more notes on our test which was really nice. She ended up just rotating between the 4 people in our group to read answers to different questions, so between the 4 of us we had it all covered. All I can say is that I am extremely thankful I was not in the first group because I would have failed the characters section.
After the exam was over we decided to celebrate by picking up some ice cream on the way home considering it was around 60 degrees. Feeling a little guilty about the ice cream, Adam, Nate, the 2 John’s and I decided to head over to the track to work out. We all kind of did our own thing but I did some running and abs. I can honestly say that the smog here is a serious issue. Granted I was already sick, but my lugs were not having the air I was breathing in. I actually found out later that there have been record highs for the air pollution in Shanghai recently and that if you are from America you should probably not run if the air quality index is over 100. Apparently it has been over 300 lately so that would explain the struggle. After we had all had enough of inhaling the smog, we headed back to the hotel and showered for our big dinner out to celebrate our Chinese final being over.
We went to a restaurant called The Camel that has a special deal where you can get a burger, fries, and a beer for 50 yuan, which is a really good price because it is expensive to get Western food here. I must say, the burger was well worth the $8 because it was enormous and one of the best I have ever had. I got the Aussie Burger, which had a fried egg, cheese, bacon, pickles, and a beet slice that completely hit the spot. It was probably the messiest burger I have ever eaten but I couldn’t have asked for a better or more American way to celebrate the conclusion of Chinese class than a burger and a beer.
After hanging around there for a while, we headed to this street that supposedly had a pretty cool bar scene. We went into this Cuban bar Jess has been reading about which was pretty cool. It was very low key but the decorations were really cool with pictures all over the walls and really nice bartenders. After drinking my first cosmopolitan (pretty good but not my favorite) we couldn’t resist but going in to this bar called Handle Bar’s with a mustache as the symbol. We walked in and there were bikes handing all over the walls and of course out of the only 2 people in there, one was from Columbus, OH which is where John is from. After talking with them for a little while we moved into a game of asshole and then for some reason attempted to teach this Chinese girl how to play Euchre. Let’s just say it was a failure but it was still a good time because she had a dog there that we were all playing with that was adorable. After not too much longer we decided to head back since we had to wake up for class in the morning. Nate, John, and Matt decided they needed a McDonald’s run on the way and Adam and I somehow resisted. We all hung out in the room for a little while and then hit the sack to rest up for the morning.
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