Today was our first full day in Shanghai!  Last night after we got off the bullet train and checked into our hotel we went and got pizza, French fries, and chicken wings for dinner.  The food here has been great so far but, it was nice to have some familiar foods after a week of trying new things.  We had five different pizzas and they were all amazing including the one with hot dog and French fries on it.  After dinner we went on a river cruise on the Huangpu River amazing.  The views of both the east and west sides of the city were beautiful from the river.  We even got a perfect view of the tallest building in Asia. We all had a lot of fun and got tons of pictures.  Our hotel is also amazing and super fancy, it’s by far my favorite one yet. 

Today we went to another university, the East China University of Science and Technology.  We started with a tour of their beautiful campus.  We got to go past their dorm buildings too which were very different from towers.  We also saw their business school which is the tallest building on their campus.  Then we had a lecture about the process of starting a business in China which we learned is pretty easy.  After our lecture we went one of their dining halls or canteens as they called them and had lunch with some of the students.  We kind had to just point at the foods we thought looked good and hope for the best.  After lunch we went to a classroom to do some activities with the students.  We all had to pass around a water bottle while music played and whoever had the bottle when the music stopped had to get up and do a performance in front of everyone.  Thankfully I never had to do that.  After that activity we got some more time to chat with the students and learn about their many festivals.  Our final activity at ECUST was a presentation from a student who moved to Shanghai from Alabama.  Him and his family had moved to China a few years ago to learn more about the language and culture.   

After we left the university, we went to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum which was really cool.  We got to see pictures of how Shanghai has changed and evolved over the past few decades and some of their plans for the city’s future.  My favorite part of the museum was the huge lit up 3D map of the whole city.

For dinner we went to a restaurant just down the street from our hotel before going to an acrobatic show.  The acrobatic show was a lot of fun and some of our group even got to go on stage.  Our plan was to have them pick Matt to throw darts at but, they ended up surprising us and picking Aryanna instead.  Matt eventually got his chance to perform later in the show though.  After the show some of us went to the second largest Starbucks in the world and spent way too much money on coffee before heading back to the hotel.