I had less really impressive photos in my second semester. I guess I did most of the cool touristy stuff so I didn't have as much good materiel. I remember I had way more food and drink photos.
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These are just some of my favorite photos arranged in no particular order. Many of my photos in the first semester were from some of Shanghai's more touristy and more famous areas, like Pudong or Thames Town. That doesn't bother me too much, sometimes places are famous for a reason. Still, I do have some great photos from the less famous places, like the subway stop photo. To be honest though, I think the picture of East China Normal's Mao statue overlooking the Global Harbor Mall is the best photo I took all year.
Today I submitted my last final, a paper on the similarities and differences between Greater-Chinese and American commercial film for Chinese Contemporaneity Cinema, so felt like I should discuss what my plans are for Jared in China. I will staying until June 1, a bit after the formal end of my program.
As with all things, I always planned the Jared in China blog to be a temporary; I expected to end Jared in China when Jared was no longer in China. To be honest, I actually expected my only reader to be my Mom and to kill Jared in China with little fanfare. To my surprise I usually get between 100-200 hits a week here, sometimes even more, so I now feel like I should explain my plans for Jared in China. I am still planning on ending the blog. I just don't think I will have as much to say nor will you have as much interest in reading about my summer studying for the LSAT and GRE tests in New Jersey. The good thing about writing a blog while abroad is almost everything I do is somewhat inherently interesting. It doesn't take much to make a trip to the fresh, aka live, fish section of a Chinese grocery store a fun read, but, once I return, my trip to an American grocery store is a weekly chore for most of my readers (although I don't know for certain since I only have the free web hosting subscription and that package doesn't include my readers location). I am not planning on ending Jared in China the minute I return to the United States. I am planning on doing travel updates at major stops on my trip home, likely just Shanghai Pudong International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, and home home. Since I took so many photos during my time in Shanghai, I would like to do a top photos post or two. I am definitely going to do some kind of China retrospective once I return to the US. I am not sure how long this retrospective will be, I might have to break it up somehow but I will only know that once I start writing it. Since I am going to be summarizing 9 months of my life I am expecting it to be long. I will need some time to decompress before writing it though. I would also like to do a blog statistics post of some kind. Finally, I am planning on turning some of my experiences in China into more formalized projects. I will hopefully be able to use my time in China as inspiration at least for a Juniata College Liberal Arts Symposium project next school year. I have a few other ideas for things I would like to base off my time in abroad but those are so rough I don't wan't to go into them. I expect that something about my time in China and Asia will come to benefit me later on in a way I can't foresee now. While I don't plan on becoming Professor Miller of East China Normal University you never really know when things pop up again. I would also like to note that I do plan on keeping a normal posting schedule until I leave China on June 1. I would like to thank my readers for the continued support of my blog and myself throughout my year abroad. Actually having readers who might get annoyed at me if I didn't write defiantly motivated me to write more regularly than I normally do. I would like to apologize for the occasional periods where I was not as diligent with posting as I should have been. I would also like to apologize for some of the misspellings. While the end of Jared in China might be a bit sad, I plan to keep doing interesting things for quite some time. Who knows, perhaps I will come back to blogging, perhaps I will think of a better name for my next blog than Jared in China. Today was ECNU's International University Showcase where students from their many programs talked about their home universities. I volunteered to table for Juniata and I guess it worked out. I did get a free hat, notebook, and lunch (I can now state with confidence that Subway in China is basically the same as Subway in the United States), but I didn't get very many visitors. The few students who visited my table were looking for graduate programs, something that Juniata lacks. I find some successes with the professors who liked to recommend small liberal arts institutions, like Juniata, to their students who wanted to study abroad. Hopefully that should become something, but who knows. I guess part of my problem was I was next to Georgetown and Johns Hopkins, two universities who do better on standard measures of university "goodness" than Juniata. Johns Hopkins in particular is way more famous than Juniata so tended to get more students interested. I guess it was cool to play admissions officer for the day and I got some cool stuff so that is nice.
Even though there is still finals week and one more day of classes to go the GCP program (my program at ECNU) had their closing lunch at ECNU's Silver Spring Western style restaurant. We heard some short speeches from representatives of the international students, International Student Office, and the professors. The lunch wasn't bad and I would say that the food was 50/50 Western/Chinese. It was short and sweet so I guess that is nice. It is kind of weird how soon I will be leaving China though.
So I got back from Hangzhou (杭州), or well somewhere close enough, since we were a little a bit outside of Hangzhou where there was no cell reception, no internet, and only sometimes spotty internet. It felt more rural than ether Fenghuang or Zhangjiajie, but we could still see the flights from Hangzhou Airport on their first assent. Still, it was nice to be somewhere where the air was nice (for China), I could see the sky, and I heard rumor that you can actually drink some of the water! Some of my friends, my professor, my professor's new cat, and myself all piled into my professor's small Volkswagen "We!". We had some lunch at a street dude who served the local rice noodle dish and some Chinese fruit I had once before but who's name I forgot. We then split up to get some food for dinner at the local Chinese BBQ place. Apparently Chinese BBQ restaurants will sell you ingredients for a barbecue if you run pick up some local vegetable dealer to vouch for you for 关系. We got the meat though than, after a hike around some of the lovley rivers, we made our way to our professor's house, or our professor's brother's house since our professor's brother actually lived there. Dinner was good, it was Chinese BBQ (if you couldn't tell that) and setting one of those up is a bit of a process. It the grill basically a metal box with some air holes that you pile as much charcoal as you can in and start cooking. Food was good, mostly well cooked, and came with the local brew and some Chinese moonshine. Finally we had some tea and went to bed. The morning was actually really impressive, the mountains actually had this silver shine that didn't capture well on camera that was super impressive. We than made our way back to Shanghai, but not before a stop for wantons. At our bathroom stop just outside of Shanghai city limits we got some zongzi (粽子). A zongzi is a type of rise pyramid stuffed with some type of meat, it isn't my favorite snacky Chinese dish but it isn't bad. I had a similar thing in Bangkok, Thailand but I liked the zongzi more. Overall it was a fun and somewhat tiring weekend, I am glad I went to one more Chinese city before I leave.
I wasn't planning on taking another trip this semester but my Neo-Confucian Philsophy professor set up a rather neat sounding trip to Hangzhou for this weekend. It will be a short trip, two days one night, and a very cheap trip, but it should be cool. Hangzhou is a city in Zhejiang Provence noted for its famous West Lake (西湖), Neo-Confucian philosophers, and increasing importance as a center of eCommerce. Wikipedia also says an extension of the Kaifeng Jews formally lived in Hangzhou but now there is no remains of the Hangzhou Jewish community.
Why is there KTV outside the dorms on a random Thursday night in May? I guess it might be because today was actually really hot. Perhaps it is because the Chinese really like KTV. It seemed like a somewhat organized thing though so there is someone, somewhere who knows why. I guess everyone was good, there was a German girl who did a whole song in Chinese so that was cool.
I made another attempt to use the massive box of bamboo I was mailed, this time some of my friends and I decided to do a Phat Thai type of dish with quail eggs and the bamboo. I would say it worked out better than my first attempt but the street guys in Thailand are still the kinds of Phat Thai. My two biggest problems this time around were that I cut some of the bamboo pieces a bit too large resulting in some that didn't cook right and the noodles were overcooked. I should have paid more attention to the noodles when I bought them because they cook in literally 3 minutes. It feels like by the time I dump them in the hot water they are ready to eat. They are faster than even the pot noodle type things. I did get use to the strange internal film of the quail eggs so using them was much easier this time around. I would say this attempt was more successful than my last attempt, even if it doesn't look pretty.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
November 2021
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