It feels very odd to say it, but I think I just had my first solo Chinese excursion that I can label “authentic” without any qualification. No tour guide, no teachers, no fluent friends to mediate conversations, no other white people anywhere, and most importantly not a word of English. It was really, really cool.

Basically this entire district is younger than I am

I’ll elaborate, but first I want to talk just a little about the trip itself. As you’ve probably surmised, I’m sitting in my hotel in Shanghai right now; I consider this an accomplishment for a few reasons. First, ordering a taxi last night whilst still just a little drunk (hey, it was the last day of finals) was pretty tricky. It is worth noting here that when the phone robot tells you that there is an “English” option, empirically it actually means “you are still basically going to have to do this in Chinese, but maybe we’ll let a few English, taxi-related nouns slip if we really have to.” Also, my cell kept constantly dropping the call halfway through the reservation, so I switched to Anna’s. Of course as soon as I did they kept calling my phone back so I was at one point forced to hold two simultaneous conversations in Chinese on both phones, which was pretty sucky.
Anyway the reservations got made, and I picked up my four hours of sleep for the second night running, and would have kept right on sleeping had the taxi driver not angrily called me at like 6:05 and demanded to know why I wasn’t outside. Or at least, that’s what I’m pretty sure he was demanding. You’ll sympathize if you’ve ever talked to a Beijing cab driver before — they are a famously heavily-accented bunch, and past a certain point the Beijing accent just sounds like one is attempting to speak around a mouthful of gravel. Add this accent to a crappy $20 phone and the “I have slept for 4 hours and been awake for 20 seconds” state of mind, and you’ve got today’s wakeup.
Turns out that I had forgotten, silly me, that my phone’s alarm clock doesn’t work when the phone is charging. 当然。
Funny thing was that Anna’s doesn’t either, so I called her and woke her up as I ran down stairs, and was able to stall the guy a little bit by loudly grumbling about how long women take to get ready, and apologizing profusely. In actuality Anna got ready even faster than I did (I took four minutes, she took two) and we actually both made it on the cab by 6:10 or so. Not too bad.

The airport was straightforward enough, because most things were translated. There was a small hiccup near the start though, when I went to the desk of my airline and asked for my boarding pass and they told me they were for flight changing only, and that I should go to the “Q.” So I walk until I find a big row of kiosk-style boarding pass machines labeled in groups from A to M. They’ve all got pretty lengthy lines, and several of them have my company’s logo on them. I am here briefly torn between trying to find the missing letter Q and assuming that the lady was trying to tell me in English to get in the Queue in front of one of the China Eastern kiosks. I look everywhere for the former, fail, then decide to pursue the latter. This doesn’t work, and irritates the kiosk people who helpfully yell Q at me some more but won’t show me where it is.
how could you resist?Eventually I just get super confused and embarrassed and wind up having to ask a Chinese lady what the letter Q means (真丢人) at which point she laughs at me and points to the special China-Eastern-Airlines-flying-from-Beijing-to-Shanghai-Hongqiao booth, labeled Q, crammed in some corner alone across the hall from A and B. Damn it, China. Whatever. At least I got to eat some 包子 at the Flavor Tang, which was awesome.

Anyway, the rest of the journey was pretty uneventful. Once I got to the hotel though, I realized I had no plug adapter, and thus couldn’t power my computer. A nerd and his internet are not long parted; as any XKCD fan will tell you, it was an unacceptable situation. So I talked to the front desk about it and they wrote down the address for some random mall like 40 minutes away. The gas station lady said to go to the same place. I grabbed a taxi and had gone maybe a block and a half, though, when I passed this store. “Well gee,” I thought. “Those sure look like the characters for ‘electronic’ and ‘devices’ but surely everybody wouldn’t be sending me 40 minutes away if I could just buy my plug here.” And then I passed this one, at which point I just yelled at the cab driver to stop, paid him like 10 kuai and got out maybe three blocks from where I’d gotten in. If I had just walked for a few streets, I would have passed two very large, very imposing electronics stores. Finding the right adapter inside the second one took me maybe two minutes and thirty kuai; a forty minute taxi in shanghai is like 80 or 90 kuai. Each way. Lesson learned yet again: always wander around a little before you commit to anything here.

I’m glad I went to the second store though, because on my way back I wandered down a side street and started talking to this dude about where he liked to eat. He pointed at the place he was standing in front of, which I hadn’t realized before was actually a restaurant. I wonder why. I’m not sure that calling this place a “hole in the wall” would really do it justice, because half of the store was haphazardly strewn around the street in front of it. I do know, though, that they don’t get a lot of 外国人 (foreigners) coming by, because when I showed up like the whole family came and chilled on the porch-ish-thing with me and just talked about anything they could.

Nicest people ever

As a slight aside to my classmates who bash the 新实用汉语课本, our textbook, it absolutely saved my ass today. I see the menu in this place and the only thing I can fully make out is 炒鸡丁, an extremely recent vocab word which translates — admittedly awkwardly — to (stir)fried chicken cubes. What’s funny though is that just yesterday, I had an oral examination in which I had to tell my teacher what I’d do when a friend of mine presented me with a tasty dish. I had rehearsed a speech about how to praise a good 炒鸡丁 chef and display my gratitude sufficiently. I definitely used about 3/4ths of it today as I was talking to the cook and her family; it was incredible (as was the dish itself. 很好吃）Plus it, along with rice and a fanta, only ran me 10 kuai. Probably one of the best meals I’ve had here.

In any event, I hung out at this place and just talked to these guys, their kids, and their friends wandering by on the street for about an hour. Combined with my hour-long conversation with the dude next to me on the plane, I’ve spoken more Chinese here in one day than I’ve done in probably my past week here combined, and I honestly enjoyed every second of it. I’m going to have a really good time here, I can tell already. Plus, Connor shows up in like 3 hours, so I don’t have much of a choice.

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