Saturday Morning

Time: 1030am Saturday

Weather: 2C, 36F

First: http://cid-359512ac45bb5a76.skydrive.live.com/play.aspx/Shanghai%20Xujaihui?ref=1

This week was full of school.  I'm not going to talk about that here.

Peking Opera

Our Chinese Culture class took us on a field trip to see the Peking Opera school of China.  Every three years, they take the best 100 opera kids from across China.  We saw them perform basic kung fu on Wednesday during their final exam tests.  Flips, crazy back bends, and simple gymnastics.  We had the option to go back the next day and see their full dress rehearsal.  It was an experience.  Aside from the very loud wood block player, it was rather enjoyable.  I couldn't stand much of it, but I guess thats not really the point.  We saw a very professional show put on by "12" year olds.  I saw twelve like that because I believe that there are some exceptions - these privileged children also get the privilege of skipping what appeared to be 5 yrs of their life as there were some children who couldn't pass for 8 yrs old in my opinion.  You'll see a few pictures in my album above.

The Food

I'm really doing alright people.  In the album above you'll see some of the different kinds of food thats served.  The taste is usually pretty average, it is just sometimes hard to get warm food unless you know where to go.  We are all learning as a group where the best places to eat are.  A group I wasn't with went out last night and got a fish at a restaurant.  I guess they picked it out of the tank, then saw it clubbed, and prepared at their table.  It is not bad, just different.  One friend of mine said he ate the eye adding it popped like a blueberry, this is not something you'll expect to hear in my stories when I return.

Odd Things

Going to shop for chopsticks last night, I saw a lady in the park with a VERY fast dog on a leash.  It was puzzling and when I got a bit closer I saw the ears of the animal.  She had a bunny on a leash and was taking it for a walk.  It was quite an odd thing to see.  The chopsticks store had plenty of selection.  Chopsticks on the walls for not much money.  A usable pair cost about $2usd.  I took a picture of the small store in and it's in the album above.

Camera

My Kodak Zi8 is doing pretty well.  I found that it is not very good at taking still photos.  The aperture time is much too long maybe as long as 1/2 second.  It makes still photos quite worthless.  The videos are pretty good looking, sometimes spoiled by my shaking hands.

Medicine

I still have a bit of a sinus issue.  I went to the pharmacy and tried to describe a z-pack with what little Chinese I've learned.  I must of gotten the point across because she handed me azithromycin tablets.  They were only $2.07 usd.  Good deal, hopefully they contain active ingredient.

The weather this weekend won't be amazing, cloudy / overcast / smog and mid 40s.  Smog is really a disappointing reality.  Might go to Yu Yuan gardens today, some people I know went to the fabric market this morning.  Apparently it is 3 floors of tailors.  I would have liked to have gone, but there is some homework I need to do with a group in a bit.

UPDATE:
If anyone has a good idea on how to stream the Colts game to me, live and at a low bitrate.. I will wake up Monday morning at 4am to watch it.  Last week I tried everything, I even bought the $70 nfl gamepass to watch the post-season online, but like most things on the internet in china, it didn't work.  I got my money back. myp2p.eu didn't work and Justin.tv failed too. I need a direct link to a server.  Everything I've looked at doesn't work so far.
Doesn't work:
-Sopcast
-Justin.tv
-Streamtorrent
-TVants
-Webguide for WMC
-Windows Media Encoder

Rumor has it that slingbox works, but the internet doesn't usually connect well enough to watch it  - but if some one is willing to let me try it i'll test it out this weekend!

JBiber

Weekend

Tuesday:

-Weather: 60F partly sunny

-Local Time: 825pm

Saturday Recap

We got a late start, not for any specific reason other than it was nice to relax a little bit.  The plan that had been formulated the day before was to make it to Yu Yuan Gardens.  There were some problems with this as we met up as a small group and talked about it.  One problem was it was overcast and low 50s.  Other people also wanted to go to the gardens and it was realized last week that it is very difficult to get a large group of engineering to agree to do anything.  The few people I was hanging out with on Saturday at noon were thinking it'd be good to keep a small group.  When people in the hotel found out that there was a group interested - we decided we'd let them go.  We decided it wasn't the best day to go to an outdoor activity like that.  The goal was to go down to Pudong (the area east of the river) and go to the indoor aquarium.

Lunch

Some of us left and we left a few people behind to finish their laundry.  A group of four of us headed into the city.  We got down to the tourist area and saw that there were plenty of awesomely tall buildings.  After a quick photo shoot we decided the Subway just down the road looked great.  An american sub shop is not as common as people might think over here.  We stopped in to see the prices and were surprised to find an excellent daily deal menu.  A 6" deal of the day was only 15 yuan.  Unfortunately, SeaSupreme wasn't what I wanted, so I just opted for a 12" ham, with two cookies and a drink for 60 yuan.  It was an american price for an american sub, i liked it.

Early Afternoon

Our small group headed towards the river.  We saw some shops and restaurants on the river walk. Nothing cheap, all very touristy - but neat to see it anyways.  We saw a few brides getting their picture taken.  The young couples here do things differently than in America.  We try and cram everything - ceremony and all into one day.  Here pictures can take place weeks after the legal paper work.  So - we saw many brides getting their pictures taken with their husbands.  We also saw The Bund from the east side of the river.  We had just tried to go up to the Cloud 9 lounge the night before so it was nice to see all these areas in the daytime.  While we walked the river, we saw the tallest building in the area - and promptly decided that it would be more fun than the aquarium.  When we got to the base of the building it was late afternoon and we saw that it was 150 yuan to go up there and go on the glass skywalk.  We thought it'd be more fun in the evening so we killed sometime at the bar, buy one get one free happy hour.  Our waitress spilled some of the drinks when she brought them to the table (party foul) so they gave us from free dessert with our drinks.

Shanghai World Financial Center

-474m tall (1500+ ft)

-100 floors

We got out of the bar just after 630pm and went up to the observatory deck.  We grabbed an elevator up to the 94th floor.  Then we took an escalator up to the 97th floor.  Then went up the last 3 floors with an elevator.  I was excited to see that it was about as awesome I was hoping.  The deck had some glass in the floors so that you could see the shear drop below.  When you look at the building in the link above - it appears to look like a very large bottle opener.  The skywalk is along the top of the bottle opener.

It was excellent, I got a few good HD videos.  Some of my friends got a few good photos.  We retired back to the hotel and played some card games before sleeping.

Sunday

Sunday started all about football.  The colts were playing in the playoffs and I was willing to do anything I could.  I spent the hrs before the game trying to find an illegitimate way to watch the game.  As the first quarter ended, I bought the NFL gamepass for 70USD.  I tried to get that to work during the 2nd quarter and then called to get my money back.  I was told I was refunded.  I found a Hooter's not too far away so I told my floormates and we grabbed a cab and headed that way.  We got to the store and found out that it wasn't going to be on, according to the manager, for 25 more minutes. We ordered and waited.  It didn't come on.  We got upset.  We sat around for a couple more hrs.  It came on in the last 5 minutes while we were in the restaurant.  Luckily I had my cards that I bought on saturday with me and we got in a couple good games of Euchre; an Indiana tradition.  As we left I got a text message telling me the colts had won, which was well enough.  Unfortunately, my good friend lost her phone in the cab on the way to Hooter's.  

Phone Hunt

I didn't grab the taxi receipt when I got out of the cab; however I did pay for the cab with the metro card.  So - When I called the taxi cab translation service and told them the situation they texted me the address of the place I was going to go.  I got in the subway with her and we started out going that way.  Basically - we go to the public transportation card company and they didn't speak english at all.  So I ended up passing my phone through the window while on the line with the translation people who were trying to help me locate the cabbie that we used earlier in the day.  After 30 minutes of waiting we heard back from the cab company and the phone was lost.  It was crushing so we got some I bought some doughnuts to console.  We returned to People Square and walked around a bit.  It was a bit concerning actually, as we walked around folks from behind us kept saying "Hello, How are you?" "Do you speak English?" "Are you American?"  It was all said from different people over the course of 5 minutes.  It sounded very under the breath of the folks who were saying it and it creeped me out so much I didn't turn around.  Apparently, the folks go to People's Square to practice their English on the foreigners.  We finished our people's square visit then went to Papa John's for dinner.  It was close to the American taste, but the cheese was different and they use more flour on the dough.

Monday and Tuesday

I've spent the last couple of days working for class and trying to get things read and be ready for everything this week.  I'm excited that tomorrow we'll be going to the Theater tomorrow for class.  We'll be going to see how the actors in the opera train for their shows.  I expect it to be painful to watch in some parts.  As part of my attempts to make the internet a bit more usable, I've shared www.mesh.com with one of my professors.  I think it'll help our class, but I really think it has the potential to help everyone. Check it out, see if you think it'd be helpful.  It saves me from emailing multiple copies of files myself.

Other than that I've just been happy to stay busy getting things done.  More to come, thanks for reading.

JBiber

News and Current Events

Time:    1145am SAT

Weather:  5C party sunny

This week there were some interesting news stories that came up and I was emailed about but never really got too far into the content of them.  News this week: Google Takes on China, Haiti Feels an Earthquake, Jay and Conan: FACE2FACE!,  and related.

The coverage of Google coming out and saying that the censorship in China must stop, especially after China has hacked Google seems like a very legitimate reaction.  All I have been able to find are stories I can't read.  This is what I know.  In Dec, Google as well as many other business got hit hard from Asia based hackers.  It seems that they did successfully break into some human rights persons gmail accounts.  Now Google is upset and thinks that since China broke the trust relationship, Google shouldn't be doing any favors by filtering the search results (which is a very real thing).  Google now is wanting to offer unfiltered results and realizes that might mean no Google China.  I hope this ends well because I use a lot of Google products to communicate back to the USA.  Then I guess, according to new headlines (basically the only thing I can read) the US gov came out and backed Google in saying that censorship needs to end.

We asked our culture teacher what the chines are thinking of this.  She said that it really doesn't matter to much of the population of China.  The majority of Chinese users don't need a search engine that is like Google, capable of handling english and chinese.  There is a search engine called baidu or something - that apparently is chinese and has 65% market share.  The people who use google are not the majority and those people who do use it are mostly from academia and research fields.  The chinese people don't feel that they are missing out on anything from the censorship.  From my prospective, missing out on anything is missing out on something.  I don't agree with the generally accepted - "if you say so" approach.

Haiti apparently went through and earthquake this week.  The headlines read that it was over 7.0 and 100,000+ are dead located near Port-au-Prince.  Thats pretty much all I know.  I heard from a friend that the US government is giving $100 million in aid.  I know there are likely some troops being sent, but I don't know how many.  I just wonder how bad things would be here if a similar earthquake struck.  I don't know what I would do as a foreign student, I'd attempt to find the US embassy.

Jay and Conan apparently are having some trouble back home.  It seems that Conan's ratings are that great and Jay's are "as predicted" which were low enough that he should clearly be taken off the air.  Now NBC wants to put Jay back on during part of Conan's time slot or even give the tonight show back to Jay.  It looks like their on the brink of an agreement to allow Jay back on later and pay off Conan.  I know I'm missing many details here, but that because I can't read many news stories at all.

I hope that Jay is unsuccessful.  I like Conan and he's been doing a great job on the Tonight show.  I also think Jimmy Fallon is growing as a host, but still laughs a bit too much to be a host.

The internet here really is crippled.  I don't know if it's obvious, but I can't access my own blog.  I have no way of uploading pictures to a good file sharing site.  I can't embed photos or videos I've taken while I've been here.  I can't access the new york times, washington post, or many many other news sites.  I must rely on AOL.com and MSN.com for new stories.  Facebook is blocked, twitter is blocked, and even worse, it appear that the blocking just gets worse everyday.  I get a ping of 130ms to whitehouse.gov (which I can't always load).  Many students are having trouble accessing purdue's webmail, blackboard, and other purdue services.  Loading webpages often takes multiple attempts and it gets very frustrating.  It is quite limiting as to what can actually be done on the internet.  For a country who is expected to be beating the USA in multiple years - it feels as though if they lifted their internet restrictions they would be past the USA much quicker if they had full access to the information pool that is the internet.  The only way to really stay productive here is to have an VPN back home.  I heard this is the only way that there was full coverage of the olympics a couple years ago and I believe thats the only way there will be coverage of the World Expo in may.

The world Expo is going to be huge for Shanghai.  It is impossible to walk past a modernized section of the city and not see the signature construction walls with the Expo banners on them.  Welding is going on non-stop and can be seen from our window.  Cement and semi trucks litter the street and aside from taxi's are the only thing on the roads at night.  I believe that the construction is round the clock trying to be done by May.  It is impressive.

Facts:

The water everywhere is not drinkable. Always must use water bottles and such.

Be sure to see the post below as it was published earlier this morning,

JBiber

Observations and Thoughts

Time: 0945 AM SAT

Weather:  3°C with Fog - expected to get sunny

I've missed out on some blogging opportunities this week and would like to spend a little time here catching up.  I'd like to first touch on the language barrier.  It is very steep.  I was under the impression that many people in Shanghai are capable of speaking English.  This impression is sorely wrong.  The only people who really speak English with comprehension are employees of tourist areas.  The airport, hotel staff, a FEW store employees.  Communication is very difficult and requires a lot of guessing, weak chinese phrases, and pointing at pictures.  To order in most restaurants we tend to not say anything at all and just point.  Though, we also have a very rigorious chinese language schedule and are expected to know 120+ vocab words by Tuesday. In one of our classes we've been discussing how knowing what the language is will only get disjunct communication.  Knowing the culture behind the language can be a much more effective communication tool, as not to offend anyone.

On Thursday I wrote at lunch about the length of the chinese language course and said we might go to the river, that didn't happen.  Some people did go down there but I didn't join.  I decided I'd much rather attempt to find the french market, where I had been told is the place to find cheese and wine.  I was told there was a Carrefour in the region and looked it up online.  It is only 20-30 minutes away by foot.  I told some others and the group grew and grew and grew.  Soon enough there were 13 of us walking to a french grocery / supply store.  A few of the people walking wanted to test the open container policy so not far beyond the gates of the school we stopped at a local grocery and picked up some beers.  Those who were drinking popped 'em and we started again after short delay.  We did make it all the way there without being stopped by any of the officers we walked by, so thats cool enough.  We got to the store and found it had many of the promises that were made to me, I picked up a few blocks of cheese and some American singles (cheese, sadly).  We found the rum that has been missed by many rum and coke fans.  I was sad to find that even the french market didn't have such common day items as Cheez-Its, Ritz, or TownHouse.  The Ritz they do have tend to be infused with random flavors, orange, lemon, chocolate, etc.  The trip there and back lead us down very busy streets.  I actually captured video of what it is like to cross the street here, dangerous. There were many vendors selling coats in small stores and roadside "crap-on-a-stick" type of shops.

Friday after school I decided I wanted to go find a tailor I had seen in a video on Shanghai.  I did a little bit of research at lunch and found the address that seemed to match the video address plate.  A small group of us, 4 total, wanted to check out the prices and see if this guy was really as crazy as he seemed to be in the video.  We embarked on the journey and missed the street.  Went too far and rather than trying to figure it out on the way and potentially get VERY lost, we returned to the university and checked a map to see what had gone wrong.  The road we needed was under construction and didn't have a sign.  We found a new route and took that.  The map indicated the tailor would only be about 30 minutes walk, we left at 5pm.  We found our road and watched the address numbers start to fall.  The map indicated it was to the east, but the numbers kept getting smaller.  We weren't quite sure why this would be true, but we just stuck with it.  There were multiple parts to this street; west, middle, east.  We had hoped the numbers started again at any division west to middle or middle to east but had nothing other than wishful thinking.  We were on a snipe hunt.  Our journey lead us to the east.  Block after block and shop after shop, we never found the tailor we were looking for.  We did find quite a fancy shopping area.  At about 630 we figured it was time to give up and just find a place to eat.  We say a Pasta and Pizza shop and it was a clear winner.  Expensive by local standards, at about 9-12 usd a person it was a good meal.  We caught the subway home and more adventuring was arranged.  I have not given up on trying to find this tailor, he is known for "Western style suits and shirts."

Friday night, after returning from our snipe hunt, I heard there were some folks who wanted to go down and have a glass or two at the world's highest lounge.  Located on the 87th floor of downtown shanghai, it takes 3 elevators and a minimum purchase of 12 usd to stick around.  We had also heard rumors that the locals turn off all the city lights at 10 pm - a race against the clock began.  We left around 845.  A couple of subway rides later we made it downtown and the lights were awe-worthy.  The construction for the world expo makes it very difficult to get around and therefore we had to walk in the wrong direction to try and get to where we needed to be, but of course this wasn't until we had already walked in the right direction and saw the say indicating this was the wrong direction which then made the wrong direction initially into the right direction in finality (we turned left, but should have gone right).  We walked and eventually got near the base, as the clock struck 10.  We lost the race and the lights began to turn off on all of the buildings.  We continued to the building and went up the first 54 floors, then transfered elevators to get to 85, after the last transfer to get to the 87th floor, we spoke with the lounge and they said, "We're sorry, we don't have room for 11 guests."  I wasn't sure if they had turned us away because we were younger and not in suits, or if they were actually full.  As we were leaving, I asked the a women working in the grand hyatt lobby on 54 if there was a dress code or anything.  She said there is, but it was only no shorts or open-toed shoes.  She assured me that we were turned away because the lounge was busy.  We knew of another place that had decent drink specials and some of us were going to head there and more of us were heading elsewhere.  However, it was now 1030 and the subway closes at 11pm (which is just insane).  We raced back but the last train that was boarding for our transfer left at 1040 and we got there at 1045. Upset.  We returned to the street and - because the subway closes at 11pm - every cab gets 4 yuan more expensive and .... is taken.  It took another 25 minutes to catch a cab.  I returned home and went to sleep. The cost was 45 yuan total, by 3 people ends up being about 2usd for a 20 min cab ride.

I'll write another post later today,

JBiber

First Week of Classes

The last couple days have been quite nice.  The smog has seemed to be a bit less and the sun has been strong.  The temperature has been about 35 +/- 10 degrees.  Not many clouds and it's quite enjoyable.  I've been keeping busy in the last couple days focusing on school.  As i have mentioned before the course load for this semester is much higher than I was expecting.  There is a lot of reading to be done, Chinese words to study, and I haven't started to look at my purdue based mechanical engineering course yet.  I fear that the workload will be interfering with the opportunities to go and experience the Chinese culture.

The food in China seems to leave a lot of american students partially filled but not satisfied.  The cafeteria food is lacking a lot of the density found in american dishes.  It is also quite rare to eat a meal with a drink other than hot tea.  In the cafeteria to get a drink you must go to a separate area where I have yet to encounter a line -- something quite rare in China as you might imagine.  It's starting to catch on that it's a good idea to keep a bottle of water at all times within reach.

Last night was an alright time.  Due to the dictation in Chinese language this morning, many people decided to stay in and get some studying done.  For dinner, no on was quite happy with the dining hall experience at yesterday's lunch - so we figure dinner (same food) wouldn't be much better.  A group of about 10 of us went to a Japanese Noodle place across the street.  I had a large bowl of noodles with like roast beef and parmesan cheese on top - about 25 yuan ($4), pretty expensive.  After dinner we all went over to McD's and got some ice cream.  I also ordered an apple pie -- which they didn't have.  She pointed to the yellow stuff on the ice cream and I didn't understand.  She then held up a Pineapple Pie and I was thinking .. yeah okay.  It was pretty much the same as apple, just sweeter.  2 pies was 7 yuan and an ice cream was 2.5 yuan - About $1.40 total.  We split the pies and it was a good time.

Today has been a hard day so far.  Thursdays is a full day of Chinese from 930-12 and 1-415.  It's a lot of Chinese and a lot of time in the same room with the same teacher.  The first half of the day went by kinda slow.  Lunch was actually pretty good today in the dining court.  It was a meatball of something, with a side of rice, and a pile of corn / carrots / chicken / beans.  I also picked up a few chicken nugget type of things.  The nuggets were cold - but it didn't take away from how awesome my non-carb filled lunch was.  It was about 8 yuan for lunch, so not much more than 1 usd.

Theres a group of people tonight who are going to head to the Bund - the river front area.  It's currently under construction for the world expo - but I think I'll go anyways.  I need to get some reading done before I get to sleep tonight though!

Thats all for now

JBiber