Day 10:
Today we started out the day with a nice short bus ride. Long commutes to various locations have been a part of our daily lives here. Honestly it felt weird not to be on a bus and napping for the entire ride. After leaving the bus I instantly began to feel the heat. It was over 95 degrees again, only this time we had to be in business casual clothes, so I was wearing long pants a shirt. It was miserable outside.
We went to a classroom to hear a lecture from a local business and economics professor. Dr. Huang spoke on the how to do business with China. Her lesson mentioned a lot of the history of China. She also talked of general business with China. Following her presentations, we met with some current students at the university and had a few hours of fun. My friend Ruben and I got paired with a student whose English name was Karen. She was very nice but had some trouble with English. She took the two of us to lunch in the cafeteria. We got two bowls of noodles, both of which were a little spicy for me, and a plate of dumplings that were the best dumplings I have had here. Weird that cafeteria food was my favorite so far. Following lunch, we went back to the classroom and participated in some interesting group activities. We played a game where we passed around a toy and if you were stuck with it when the music stopped you had to perform. I ended up losing once and did the macarena. Later Ruben, Karen, and I lost at never had I ever, so we performed the Chicken Dance for everyone. This ended our day at the university.
After this we came back to the hotel and had a blog writing “party.” Every time these events happen no one ever gets any work done. Dinner was great though. We went to a local restaurant down the street and had soup dumplings. We all ate a big lunch, so we only ordered 4 orders of dumplings for 7 people. This cost us each 5 Yuen. We got dinner for each under 1 dollar. I can’t get enough of how cheap food is here.
The night was when things got fun. We went to an acrobats show at 7:30. It is crazy how flexible and strong all the performers were. The most fun part was when I got called up on stage to have knives thrown at me. They blindfolded me and threw 5 knives on all sides of me. My heart was pounding so much. It was a fun experience.
After the show we did not take the bus home, instead we stayed on the main street of Shanghai. The street was beautiful, but we really did not go into anything. We made our way to people’s square park. It was poorly lit, so it was kind of sketchy to walk through at night. We made it to a subway station just to find out that it was about to close for the night. As an alternative we walked 3.5 miles back to the hotel. It was an interesting walk, but is was alright because everyone was together and talking.