yesterday i
- flew 11.5 hours from LAX to seoul, korea on asiana airlines, who recently won the gold award in service in the food and drink category, and this really showed! they came around for drink service like 3 times, not including the hourly trays of water and oj that were accompanied by red-aproned stewardesses
- ate bibimbab for lunch! soooo good! soooo happy! before lunch, they gave us a chex-mix type of snack pack, and then after lunch they gave us asian ham&egg sandwiches. THEN they gave us another snack, and i had shrimp dishes that didn't make sense - pretty much potato salad and tomato sauce penne with pink petite prawns nestled atop.
- watched the last 15mins of spiderman-3 (because that's all that i could stand, anyway, i slept through the whole thing on purpose), and a really cute korean movie called bunt. i HIGHLY recommend it - it's about dong ku, a kid who is kind of slow, eager to be the baseball team's waterboy and subject to daily taunting, but ends up befriending many and has a chicken cafe-owning father who dances & sings with his son despite threats of cancer and losing his home because he can't afford it anymore.
- got delayed for an hour in the incheon/seoul airport where i was fighting to stay awake since it was 3 in the morning our time
- slept every time i wasn't eating on the flight to shanghai (food definitely not worth mentioning here)
- met richard, a businessman who helped me figure out all the paperwork and get me to the right airport station
- was greeted by david, who took me by bus and taxi to the university where we are getting trained and oriented (interestingly, this guy named mountain started talking to david because he had overheard him speak english to me, and later found out that mountain lives in hacienda heights and is in shanghai/china for the first time as an intern)
- woke my roommate (who happens to be my future colleague/co-worker michele) to get into my room and promptly fell into bed at 11:30 or so, which is 8:30 in the morning pacific time
today i
- ate my first breakfast of tofu/spinach soup, cobbed corn, a slice of fried sesame-sprinkled bread with a bit of ham, and some orange squishy squash
- learned survival chinese from apple, our chinese teacher (qing wen ce suo zai nar?) (wow, that looks really bad without pinyin accents)
- received a lecture on chinese cultural considerations, including a hefty list of taboo topics
- received another lecture about student expectations and second language acquisition
- ate buffet of lunch, incl. sea cucumber, steamed green onion bun, barley/corn soup, salty chicken, and some sort of green vegetable
- called my famerly and my fiance :) (finally getting th phone card to work after reading up on the kinds of charges i've been occuring)
- visited the old quarters of shanghai with very beautiful gardens, crowds of koi in green ponds, and historic architecture. contrasting this 600-yr-old place were the huge shopping malls as well as little stores/stalls that were in the same plaza (kind of like cannery row in monterey - historic buildings used not for historic purposes but as a central commercial/tourist hub)
- began coveting the beijing olympics backpacks being sold for 99-150 RMB (have you seen those characters? i don't usually fancy supercute things but wow these characters! look for jingjing the panda)! lucky for me i don't have any money yet!
- was approached by several beggars as we walked back to the bus from the quarters. this was actually extremely sad because of the aggression they exhibited, as well as observing how people in my group responded. it's difficult, especially because almost all of the beggars were not only elderly, but women! this was very surprising to me. another difficult thing for me is knowing that i can't get involved politically or socially in order to sustain my integrity as an english teacher representing america and my organizatin. two teachers were deported this last year for being active demonstrators, which seems pretty hardcore to me, but you never know in china.
- ate at an uighur restaurant. the uighur people are an ethnic minority living in central asia, so they are closely related to the turkish, and i think it really shows up in their facial features. we had so much food! there must have been like 20 dishes. we drank tea from bowls and ate chicken off sword-like skewers.
- came back to my hotel room and learned that i had internet capabilities! so good! :)
