Adventures in Shanghai

We took another overnight train from Xi’an to Shanghai, which was over 16 hours long!! We had relatively nice places to sleep compared to some others, with 2 bunks in each little room with a small TV. Two of the guys in our group helped me some with learning Chinese. I hope a year from now I will be able to carry on a conversation in Mandarin.




We arrived around noon in Shanghai and had a little bit of free time so we went to a local market. It is kind of fun now to go to these places and bargain the price for things. Sammy and I each got real pearls for less than $2 USD each! It’s been pretty fun, but it’s really annoying when you are walking through the place and every person is motioning you to come in their store or they will take you by the arm to show you their product. That evening we went on a short cruise ship on Huangpu River and looked at the city. I absolutely love it here at night because all the buildings are lit up with lots of different colors!





Well today we met with the other 170 students here from Purdue and went to the World Expo here in Shanghai. The Expo consists of each of the 192 countries pavilions highlighting their own country. Some of the exhibits are really high-tech and popular to go to, which the wait to get in is about 3 hours. So we didn’t end up seeing any of those, but we went to some smaller ones like Peru, Columbia, and one about each of the provinces in China. So today for lunch we had Papa John’s…I almost forgot what American food was like, but it was a nice
break from always having rice and noodles.




Tomorrow we will have another full day in the Expo, so I hope to see some of the bigger ones like the U.S.A., Japan, Italy or even Saudi Arabia. To conclude the day, there was a banquet for all the Purdue and SJTU (university in Shanghai) students.