Island Adventure

(Eating lasagna and garlic bread in Shanghai before almost missing my train back to Hangzhou this weekend)

Well, its been an exciting few weeks. Very busy. The long-awaited Chinese boyfriend dream has become a reality. The weekends have been full of visitors and adventures with my mid-week crammed with work and prep and Chinese lessons. This past weekend, however, was holiday (tomb-sweeping festival) so the weekend was extra long. I don't have any classes I teach on Friday, so I ducked out of town on Thursday afternoon and hopped the bus to Shanghai. (I love the direct bus....). 3.5 hours later, I was downtown in the Jing'an district and met Yang Yang for dinner. He lives in a part of town that is lined with high-rises and high-end shopping (yeah, Gucci, Prada, ect) but the middle of the blocks have older houses- specifically brick buildings Americans built in the early 1900s. I spent the next day hopping around Shanghai on my own, doing some shopping, drinking over-priced coffee, and reading. I was going to try to make it down to the foreign language bookstore, but I missed my stop and ended up on the other side of the river in PuDong (that's where the famous tower/needle is in Shanghai). As I was about to hop back to the metro, I hear someone yell "Lynn?!". Sure enough, its one of the Indonesian foreign exchange students from my university in Lin'an. I remember being surprised when I would run into someone I knew when I was shopping at the mall in Madison. Shanghai is a city of some 17 MILLION PEOPLE. The odds of randomly meeting someone on the street I know ... well.. I just think its wild.
Saturday morning, Yang Yang and I headed out to Shengsi- an island off the coast of Shanghai. To get there, we first took a bus over a 30km bridge (2nd longest in the world) to an island that has Shanghai's port. This port is the largest one in the world (see above photo). 95% of all of China's exports are shipped by.... ship. It was staggering the amount of goods you would see on one ship. I started to think about how many of my clothes, my belongings I purchased in the states had gone through this port. Probably the vast majority. How much money was invested in one of those big trailers they hoisted onto the freighter. So many goods. So many investments.
The thing about traveling with someone who actually likes to take photos is 1. I actually have photos of me and 2. he actually doesn't have reservations about just taking pictures of Chinese people. So please enjoy all the photos I have this blog, as they were not taken by me. Shengsi is a small island some 15-20 km long and an hour ferry ride from the island with the big port. It has one fairly big city that looks like pretty much any Chinese city, with a lot of fresh sea food everywhere.
The island is also fairly fortified. On the cliffs around the beaches there were lots of little lookouts where gunmen could be stationed. It is one of the closest places in China to Japan, and there is a military base on the eastern part of the island. I actually found this out in a fairly interesting way. We were on a bus to the eastern part of the island to go see some temple, but before we got there we were told to get off the bus. We didn't really understand why, so we kept walking eastward towards the temple even though it was still 2km away. Then, the guy who gave us directions comes running after us, telling Yang Yang that there is a military base there and I'm foreign and can't go there and that he is a police officer. Hmm, awkward. So it put the whole island in this odd light- that if things really went wrong with Taiwan and a war theoretically broke out between China and the US, those little bunkers could theoretically be used to shoot at our boys. What a weird thought. It made me think a lot about perceptions- here I was, trying to learn Chinese, living in China, standing with a Chinese boy. And how odd that would have been so recently in the past. How impossible. In red, communist, China. How a line can't just be marked on the world where people on one side are good and on the other side evil. Because, afterall, we really aren't a world of governments, we're a world of people.
The beaches were very quiet this time of year, and even on beautiful, sunny Sunday, we had the whole beach to ourselves. The last time I'd seen the ocean was this past summer in California when the concept of going to China seemed progressively more certain- but still incredibly fantastic. I don't think my mind can fully comprehend that now I've looked back the other way across the Pacific, an ocean away from home.
Seafood... is definitely not my favorite cusine here in China. This is how shrimp is prepared. And my stomach didn't particularly enjoy it. We definitely appreciate a greater distance between us and the origin of our food in the US. Hopefully I can adapt a little better with time.
These pictures were taken Saturday at the beach, an hour or so before it started raining. This is at the north beach, but the island is so narrow here, the south beach is just a 30 minute walk away.
Is it too stereotypical if I post this photo of him doing a kungfu-like kick? I don't think so.
Well- I can jump about 3inches off the ground by comparison according to this photo...

Good times, good times.