My time getting to China was hectic to say the least. My final flight from Tokyo was scheduled to arrive in Shanghai at 9:45 p.m. It was about a three-hour flight. The original time of departure was 7:30 but was then delayed to 8:05. We boarded the plane and I was exhausted so I fell asleep within 5 minutes. I didn’t have a clock of any sort on me so I’m not sure how long I slept for but I woke up to the captain telling us that we had to go back to the gate because of problems in the cockpit. I slept most of the flight but we finally landed at 11:40. I went through immigration and got my luggage and went through customs and my public relations professor Juan Meng and her husband Po-Lin were waiting for me. We finally got to our guesthouse at 1 a.m.

 Tuesday was our first day of classes. We all had intercultural communications at 9:30 then I had my public relations class at 11. We had the rest of the day to ourselves so a few girls and I did a little exploring. The main street outside of the university has a lot of little shops and restaurants and a convenient store. We walked down there and all made some solid purchases. Everything is SO cheap it’s awesome! We came back to our rooms around 4 and hung out for a little bit then the whole group headed to the French Concession close to 7. One of the professors went with us but he knows no Mandarin. Juan, the professor from Shanghai, wrote out where to go for our cab drivers. We went to an Irish place called O’Malley’s and all of us ordered pizza. We all found it funny that we are in China, at the French Concession, in an Irish restaurant, eating Italian food! We went to a small bar called the Cancan bar for a few drinks after that. The professor that was with us, Roy, decided it was time to leave after the hostess working there had been hitting on him since we got there because she thought he was David Hasselhoff!

Yesterday we had to get up at 6 a.m. because we were heading into Nanjing for the day. We took a bullet train there which got to about 200 mph. If we were to drive there it would take about 4 hours. When we got there a lady named Wei Peng met us. I am not sure how the professors know her but two students who will be studying at UD starting in July accompanied her! First we went to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. It was very interesting to learn about because none of us had heard of it before. Right across the street was the building the silk used to be made for the emperors. We walked through quickly then headed to lunch. We went to a restaurant called Yos Mite. We had a private room for our group of 17. The tables were normal tables we would see in the states but rather than a normal chair it was big cozy chairs and couches! It was really pretty. I had a steam pot rice bowl that had beef and vegetables and a fried egg on top. It was pretty good but there were some chunks of things in there that I wasn’t entirely sure what they were so I didn’t eat all of it. After that we went to a few different tombs of emperors from the Ming Dynasty. One of them had 394 steps to get up to it. Unfortunately, it was closed due to construction and is re-opening on June 20^th. So close! We got up part of the way but just not all the way to the top. A group of Chinese boys about our age wanted to take pictures with us and were really excited that we said yes! A little bit later we saw them again and they insisted on more pictures! Our last stop for the day was the Xiaoling Tomb who was also part of the Ming Dynasty. His actual “tomb” was a whole mountain. He had over 70 wives and they were also buried with him. We got back to the train station at 5:30 but our tickets for the train were not until 7. We didn’t have time to go out for a fun dinner and the closest restaurants were either McDonalds or KFC (KFC has more restaurants in China than anywhere else in the world!). We finally got home a little after 9 and were all exhausted. We all had some reading to do for our classes so just relaxed and called it a night!

I just got back from class and we have the rest of the day to ourselves. We are all about to shower and go wander around and see what we see!