Day 52: February 24, 2013 Settling in Minhang

After a long and exhausting couple of weeks, I got to sleep in and take my time to have a day of just getting things together and organized. I woke up and started sifting through some of the 1000’s of pictures we had acquired over the trip until Adam, John, and I headed to the grocery store to stock our rooms.We got garbage cans, towels, laundry detergent, snacks, and such which was a lot more of an ordeal than expected as the store was packed. After that, we walked home, dropped our stuff off and then headed to the dinning courts for our first meal on campus.

My bed

I somehow managed to get some noodles with chicken egg and veggies, which were really good. I think everyone was pretty satisfied for our first attempt so then we went back to the dorm to get all of our stuff unpacked. I spent a good amount of time getting everything unpacked and organized and then did a beyond overdue couple of loads of laundry. Surprisingly enough it wasn’t that difficult even though the directions on the machine and my detergent were all in Chinese. I managed to communicate with the lady at the front desk to get the tokens for the machines and then I was good to go.

After grabbing my laundry and bringing back upstairs to hang dry on the window, I took one of the most refreshing showers I have ever taken. I hadn’t used conditioner in weeks since I didn’t want to waste the space or spend the time to put it in a little container so my hair felt amazing afterwards. We actually have to pay for hot water here, which is pretty lame but it is only 2 yuan for probably 20 minutes, which is next to nothing anyway. After using the whole time to just enjoy feeling clean, I got out and got back to sifting through pictures from our trip.

I probably spent 4 hours or so going through all of them and posting them to Facebook in addition to a bunch of other pictures I hadn’t been able to download since the first couple of weeks here. To take a break from that, I went and grabbed some dinner at the dinning courts, which was another success. Ordering was a struggle since we just kept asking for fried rice but apparently there are like 8 different kinds and we couldn’t tell the difference so we didn’t know what to do. Eventually we just pointed to some stuff and ended up with vegetable fried rice, which was really good. After dinner I continued on my picture rampage and after getting that all take care of, continued along the same lines by hanging up pictures around my desk that I had brought from home. Now my room actually feels like a real dorm room and is pretty homey, which is nice. After finally feeling settled, I called it a night to prepare for our first day of class in the morning!