Before I get into the first full day in Shanghai, let me just briefly talk about the river cruise the night before. Shanghai is so cool! It’s basically like New York on steroids. The skyline at night is is like nowhere else I’ve seen with all of the lights. There are even two buildings next to each other which light up with a moving butterfly.

Plus, just in the few hours that we were in the city the day we arrived, the number of cool cars is just astounding! Anyway, onto Shanghai day 1. Admittedly, the official daytime activities weren’t the most exciting. We started with a trip to the East China University of Science and Technology. Everyone there was very nice, but the facilities and food didn’t quite measure up to CUFE, so it was honestly just a little underwhelming. The next stop was the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. Again, it really was cool to see how quickly Shanghai has developed and continues to grow, but a museum of urban planning can only be so interesting. The highlight of the visit, though, was definitely the scale model of the complete city (pictured on the cover of this post) which is updated every year. It had to have taken up a few hundred square feet of the room and the amount of detail put into it was amazing. We were even able to find our hotel. After we returned from our activities of the day, it was a quick turnaround to leave for the optional acrobatics show that the entire group elected to attend. Quick note: as we were waiting for the show to start, I learned that Chase is actually really good at close-up magic so yeah there’s that. Anyway, even despite the fact that the show was totally geared towards tourists, it was still extremely impressive. There were maybe around ten acts that ranged from classic acrobats to a trapeze performance to a balancing act with lots of champagne glasses. We even managed to get three members of our group up on stage throughout the show. The final act was definitely one of the most impressive with two ballet dancers pulling off some crazy stunts.

By the time the we exited the theatre, everyone was thoroughly impressed and feeling very untalented. It was that this time that pretty much everyone decided stay out and explore the city rather than taking the bus back to the hotel. So we just wandered around enjoying the Shanghai night and going into some of the many luxury stores that we could absolutely not afford to buy anything in. Eventually, some of us stumbled onto the Starbucks Reserve Roastery, which is the largest Starbucks location in the world. We walked in and could hardly believe our eyes. The place was huge and had 5 different coffee and tea bars all separated into regions of the world. To put it simply, I lived every white girl’s fantasy. Now even though it was 10:30 PM, there was no way that I could leave without trying some fancy coffee, so Jake and I went ahead and ordered some siphon-brewed Rwandan coffee, which, and I can’t stress this enough, SLAPPED. It was without a doubt the best coffee I’ve ever had and also the most caffeinated.

After finishing just one little cup-full of the pot, I could already feel my heart beating faster. But of course, I had to finish all of it. So I did. By the time we left, I was absolutely wired and felt like I could run across all of Shanghai. So Jake, Mike, Frankie, and I continued to roam the streets of the city for a while mostly just admiring the plethora of exotic cars. Surprisingly, though, when we returned to the hotel a short while later, I was able to fall asleep relatively quickly.