On the town with Clement and Later Geeked-Outed with Nathan

2238 5-15-10

Man it was hard getting out of bed today.  But I figured I had to write yesterday's blog and needed to make head way on the posts for the trip, also had to run this English Corner for ECUST.  Luckily it was really easy to teach the English Corner this week, it's hard to mess up when there is no one there.  I gotta speak to Tokkie about this, if there aren't people that actually want to do this then please let me know so I'm not wasting my time.

After that Clement and I went out to explore Shanghai.  He hasn't had much time so this was his first time out in awhile.  We just went to People's Square and started walking.  Found the street ChiPu Lu (spelling may be off), but basically it's this huge clothing street that only Chinese really seem to be interested in so we had fun just looking around.  I actually think I had been there before and just didn't realize it, because everything looked super familiar.

We also found this bookstore on the way back that was having this awesome type of sale.  Basically you paid for the book by the weight.  So like 500g cost 15RMB.  Sadly I didn't see anything that truly interested me, all the art books were mainly abstract, and the rest were in Chinese, except for a shelf of English books, but they didn't hold much interest for me either.  Anyways it was cool looking around; they literally just had piles of books EVERYWHERE.

Once we were back on campus we joined up with some of the others to go get some sushi.  I ordered some steak and some "chick fritters" which ended up being fried cartilage, really strange but I ate it.  The bill took forever to get though; we need to start telling the waiter to just start counting us as separate customers from the get go, because the concept of breaking down the bill for each person is just completely foreign to them.  This isn't really their fault at all; we're the outsiders, we should adapt to find some sort of compromise.

On the way back Nathan and I totally geeked out and started swapping tv show recommendations and obscure references with each other.  It's nice to have those conversations every once in awhile and I now have the first two seasons of Dr. Who, as well as a new movie, Mind Game, to watch.

Alright I have to go to bed early because I have to wake up early tomorrow to take part in this Dragon Boat race our school is hosting.  I'll tell yall about that tomorrow.  Night.