First week in China [October 15th-22nd]

I spent my first week in China in Shanghai doing some contract and visa stuff with the other new arrivals. This was largely boring, and it leaves me with a lack of things to say here about it. On the day of the 15^th of October I woke up early, met a whole mess of people in the hotel lobby, and then we were all put into vans and driven to the headquarters of the school I would be teaching at. We got there did some boring contract things, and went about for a walk in the city. We ended up back in East Nanjing Road, where I had been the night before. This time it reeked just as hard of that fake, plastic, Disneyland, times-square feel. I noticed the massive Apple store this time around.

That night I made plans to meet up with some people to grab dinner. One of these people had been in China previously and spoke Mandarin reasonably well. I was excited; I was going to get me some real, authentic Chinese food. We walked maybe five minutes from the hotel and found a street lined with restaurants rather literally around the block from the hotel. But of course, once you got there no one spoke English, so maybe the clerk’s recommendation to send me elsewhere the previous night had been justified.

Anyway, we sat down and I order ‘whatever they are having’, a good technique when you have no idea what anything is. The food was ok, and that’s giving it more than it deserves. Everything tasted over seasoned and oily. But the prize winner was the chicken someone ordered. My best description of it? Imagine a whole chicken that was eaten by a family. The remaining carcass is then cut into tiny bits of mostly bone crowned with a few fibers of meat. This is then fried in a ton of oil and over seasoned. What made this meal great was that no one had the gall to be the culturally insensitive prick to call the dish out for what it was. Every bite was satisfying, but not so much in the taste, but in the idea that the chef was going to meet up with some friends later tonight, drink beer and joke ‘And then we served the foreigners a plate of leftovers, and they FUCKING ATE IT!!!’

I get a strange gratification in thinking that that is how the experience went down.

A man can dream, right?

The rest of the week was pretty much wash rinse and repeat of this, replacing the contract signing with other boring bureaucracy and a bit of English teaching theory that can best be described as CELTA lite. It felt like a waste of my time until I remembered that I was being paid for it. I got with it after that. Even the meals we had were sort of same-y from day to day; that is to say, largely bad. I rolled with it. But what I liked the most about shanghai despite all this boredom was all the opportunities it afforded me to ride around in Shanghai’s excellent, excellent metro system. I don’t know why, but I really get off on metro lines. I love them so long as they work (which is why I hate DC’s).  The only problem I had with them is sometimes they had incredibly confusing exits.

I was taken out to one nice meal while I was in Shanghai by a former flatmate of my father. She took me to a restaurant that was well recommended as a place you take foreigners to. The food was the best I had so far, and that made it ok at best. I had a chicken in a pot, which was a whole damn chicken in a whole damn pot. The meat fell of the bones (this is a good thing). The feet were till on it, and I thought my host was joking when she asked me if I wanted them. Then she ate them. I’m still working p the courage, but I’ll try them eventually. I’m told they don’t taste of much. After this restaurant, my ration of good Chinese food to bad went to record high of 1/11.

One last thing to report on my time in Shanghai. While I was at work we were broken into teams and told that with our team we would have to teach a 50 min class together on my last day in Shanghai. I was assigned to a group with three greenhorn teachers, all of them Chinese. They were nice enough but it seemed obvious that they didn’t get it. We barely had any time to practice. All things considered, we had a few hours to practice before we had to do it. I got the idea of what the school wanted immediately, but the other teachers seemed clueless. I did my part, and I think I did it relatively well, but it may have been the worse class I ever taught.

Every day I had in Shanghai was sunny and beautiful. That all changed on the 22^nd of October, when I had to get on a train and move to Hangzhou. That day, a nice thick layer of pollution rolled in…

14th of October [Leaving Korea for China]

On the morning of the 14^th of October, I woke up, lazily showered, packed all my belongings, checked out of the hostel, retrieved my heavily overweight bags that I had put into storage, and taxied out to Busan airport. The terror set in immediately. I checked in and was told my bags were overweight, something in knew was coming. I pulled out my credit card and passed it to the check-in agent who instead insisted that I take some things out of my bags.  I explained to him that this was impossible, as I would have nowhere to put it. He insisted, I countered, and ultimately he just told me that it would be ok ‘but just this time.’

That certainly won’t be a problem.

Travelling instills in me a paranoia that I will be late, that I will forget something important, that I will have somehow screwed something up. It is far, far from an enjoyable experience. After check-in, I paced and pondered what I may have left at the hostel. This got old, so I distracted myself with some internet until boarding. Not to long after that the plane began to move, and I white knuckled the fuck out of the arm rests until cruising altitude.

You’d never guess I’d been flying since I was five.

Shortly thereafter turbulence kicked in and I ended up gripping the hand of the poor sucker seated next to me. I’m pretty sure I terrified that poor little Asian guy. In that I was absolutely miserable, they two hour plane ride felt like a damned eternity, and when the damn thing finally landed a gasped the relieved gasps of someone who finally pulled it off. These two hours would be the high point of my religiosity for the coming year – at no other point would I plead the lord’s help and mercy as much as I had that day.

I got off the plane, went through immigration, found the nearest bathroom, and threw-up the awful kimchi I had been served on the flight.

At the baggage claim carousel a little scruffy-looking mongrel dog trotted against the traffic of the passing luggage. It had a sign on it introducing it as the contraband dog. It had to have been the cutest invasion of privacy I had ever seen. After the terrible flight, I really wanted to pet it.

A dude who spoke no English whatsoever got me from the airport to my hotel. At first, Shanghai was little more than a few tall building in the distance. And then suddenly, in an eye blink, we were in the middle of the city, on a stretch of highway that acts as a main traffic artery for Shanghai. After a long time, we ended up at the hotel, which seemed to me to be in the middle of nowhere. I checked in, got connected to the internet and asked myself for the first time what in the actual fuck I was doing in China.

I had prior to this received a schedule from my work instructing me on what I would be doing every day in Shanghai. For the rest of today it simply said ‘get situated.’ I figured I was situated enough, and it was time to explore a bit of the city. I went to the receptionist and asked if there was someplace nearby I could get some food. I was told that no, there was not, and I would have to go downtown. I would later learn that this is something of a default answer in China. The Chinese, though otherwise courteous, start on the assumption that you are not competent to do much of anything in China. After all, no one speaks English here, and Chinese is hard for foreigners.

Anyway, the hotel clerk recommended I go to East Nanjing Road to get something to eat. I agreed, caught a taxi and set out.  Well, East Nanjing Road turns out to be the god damn Times Square of Shanghai, everything is lit up with giant glowing marquees and bright neon signs. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t my speed for sure. What’s worse, the place was lined with nothing but McDonalds, KFC, and pizza hut. A little disappointing, to say the least. I was also approached by women offering massages and men offering drugs, tea, women, whatever. Only one of them figured it out and finally added ‘you want Chinese food? I’ll take you to a good restaurant!’ to the end of his speech. One women simply put her arm through mine and walked with me for a good five minutes before I shook her off.

Went back to the hotel without eating. Felt pretty disappointed with me first night in China.