As with all things my adventures in China and Asia are comming to a close. I just found my gate at Shanghai Pudong International Airport for my flight back to Newark, NJ where this whole thing started back in September of last year. Hopefully I will have enough reading meterial for the 14-16 hour flight, if not there is always TV.
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Just got off my 16 hour flight from Shanghai and am now safely back in New Jerset, USA.
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. 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.
On our last day in Xiamen we were all woken up at the bright and early 6:00AM to visit the last three things we didn't see in the city: a Buddhist temple, a fort, and a former fishing village turned shopping center. I actually don't have much to say on anything since we spent so little time in each location. What I can say is that the Buddhist temples in other parts of China were nicer than the one in Xiamen simply because they had less people. The fort is a fort, it had big guns pointed at the Nationalist (I guess now Democratic Progressive after their last election) "Republic of China" occupying Taiwan; we only spent like 20 minutes there so I think we actually spent more time driving to and from the fort than we did in the fort. Finally we went to an old fishing village that is now a shopping center, I had coffee and tasted a Taiwanese shaved ice. Diplomatic abnormalities and political conflict are no reason why we can't enjoy a shaved ice every once in a while, right? We had lunch at a distinctively Chinese barn of a sea food restaurant that was actually pretty good. I guess I got the fish I wanted but I could have used a Sedrin (the local Xiamen beer). We were then taken to the train station for our six hour trip back to Shanghai. We made it back pretty late so my friends and I got a roast meat sandwich from less sketchy roast meat guy.
I am now back at ECNU, in my bed, writing my blog. My last day in Xiamen was actually quite a long one, we had a 6:00AM wake up time only to get back to campus by 9:00PM. I didn't really get to write at breakfast (like I was normally doing in Xiamen) nor did I get to write at night (because by the time I got back to my room I was in no position to write anything) so I am going to try to publish my last two days in Xiaman a bit later than I planed.
Tomorrow, Wednesday 19th, I will be going on the Spring ECNU field trip to Xiamen in Fujin Provence by Taiwan. Xiamen is a "small" Chinese city noted for its lovely gardens, seafood, and for being one of the first cities the Chinese Emperors opened to the Western "barbarians." It should be fun, I am looking forward to sitting on a patio drinking Tsingtao, eating a horrifically unkosher animal, shaking my fist at the Republic of China occupied the Provence of Taiwan. I have high hopes for Xiamen, it should be fun. Hopefully ECNU's staff will let me chill a bit because that is really what one should do in a shore city. It should be noted that a shore city and a beach city in China are very different things. The only real beaches in China are on Hainan while the whole east of the country has shore. For the most part, you can't swim in good chunks of the country. I will keep the blog updated.
As some of you may or may not know, East China Normal University is one of China's major research universities. Thanks to new technology invented by East China Normal's own School of Science and Engineering I have been given the opportunity to study abroad from my study abroad. I will truly be standing on the cutting edge of both physics and history with this opportunity. Dr. Zong (棕老师) of ECNU's School of Science and Engineering in conjunction with Prof. McFly of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics at NYU Shanghai have invented a BYD e5 with a built in flux capacitor that, once it reaches 141.62 km/h or 88mph, can travel backwards or forwards in time. Since the BYD e5 is an electric vehicle, only minor upgrades were needed to get the car to accept the new plutonium electric generator in the trunk. Hopefully, I will be going back to 1885 to do research on Shanghai's International Settlement, now called the Bund. Being an American, I should have few problems blending into the multinational community that was the International Settlement. Unfortunately, I will have to put my blog on hold during my time in the past though, if all goes well, you my dear readers shouldn't notice anything since for you it should feel as if as though I was only gone for a few seconds. If something does go wrong, I will be removed from the timeline so you won't be stressed about my issues at all. That's time travel for you, so it goes. For those of you who are worried, don't be, Dr. Zong and Prof. McFly have assured me that everything will be alright and I will be back safely in this time period before you can even finish reading this post. I have also been talking with Juniata, the College is willing to transfer the credits ECNU is giving me for doing this research project back when I return in September. It will be a bit of extra paperwork though, since I will be on a new study abroad experance. I will update you all soon when I get back to the future.
Note: Have a happy April Fools Day all. From Changsha I spent most of my day on a bus to Zhangjiajie. Zhangjiajie is basically Chinese Yellowstone. It is China's oldest and best preserved national park. I will be spending some time in Zhangjiajie park, Wuyingyuan (where my hotel is) and Pheonix Ancient Town (凤凰县). I will be spending Chinese New Year here so look foward to some great photo to come.
I have made it to my hotel room in Changsha, Hunan, China and am doing fine. Changsha seems way more Chinese than Shanghai. I had to go to the special customes line for diplomats and the like because all the regular forigner lines were closed for the night. While the border guard did speak some English he did prefer me to anwser in Chinese and only seemed to vaguly understand the student visa system. He was ready to get angry at me for entering on a cancelled visa before he relized that having a cancelled X1 student visa means you were issued a residency permit which lets you into the country. I guess they don't see many forign students. The airport cabbie didn't understand my spoken Chinese at all, he did understand my written Chinese so everything worked out in the end. Once at the hotel, the lady at the desk could only communicate with me through her phone's translator. I did get my room, even though I am now Mr. Jared, Mr. Paul Miller Jared to be specific.
South East Asia retrospective at some point soon. |
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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