Embarrassed, me not this table! (and other stories of renewing one's visa in China)

My current visa expires in 5 weeks and I need to get it renewed. But first I had to get the Temporary resident registration form. I should have done it when I first moved into my apartment 3 weeks ago, but it was no big deal. My real estate agent, Jane, went to the Public Security Bureau (China's rather cryptic name for the Police) with me yesterday, and after waiting in line for a while, the police lady (who Jane knows on a personal basis because she does this for all her clients) gave me exactly what I needed.

Now, to get the visa renewed is a bit of a hassle. Shanghai apparently isn't renewing visas right now because they're tightening security in the lead-up to the World Expo. But my school will help me send my passport to Beijing and get the visa there. It will cost $250, which is twice as much as I paid at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. Kind of surprised by that, but not much I can do. Important thing is, I'm taking care of this early, and I should get my renewal without a problem.

That's a far cry from the idiot whose blog I'm about to quote. The guy is an English teacher in China and his blog is the #3 result when you Google "renew visa in china" (I'm not going to link to it here because I don't want to further contribute to Google's directing people to his blog). He begins by saying "it is my fault" but then devolves into a tirade about why it is in fact the fault of all those unhelpful, neglectful, majiang-playing Chinese people. What an idiot. He waits until 3 days before his visa expires and then expects bureaucrats to wait on him hand and foot? I guarantee if foreigners in the United States tried the same thing, they would face a similar impasse. This is a perfect example of the kind of offensive, self-entitled, tactless expat mindset that I despise. Notice how quickly he segues from his immediate visa problem to what he sees as the wider problem of Chinese culture itself.

It is my fault. I shouldn’t have waited until three days before my visa expires to look into renewing it. I just never thought the process would be so difficult. Dealing with government officials in China is enough to want to make me pound my head against a slab of concrete for an hour. I walked into a local police station this afternoon with the intent of renewing my visa, which in my situation, I should be able to do quite easily. These people almost completely ignored me and when I finally squeezed out of them that I was in the wrong police station, they refused to give me any information about where I needed to go. There is such a disconnect in China as well as a lack of concern amongst government officials towards foreigners and Chinese people alike. If it’s not specifically their problem, they could care less what happens to you. It is also difficult to deal with these people considering that they don’t answer their phones half of the time mainly because they are either on break (11-3 in some places that I have been) or playing Majiang with their fellow officers.

But enough of that. I've got some funny translations coming your way.

Before Jane agreed to help me, I texted my landlord about the issue. Here's what she texted back:

不好意思， 我这边没有这张表哦！关于这个可能你得询问下专理该项的相关政府机构

Here's what Google Translator makes of it:

I am sorry, I did not in this form here, Oh! About this you probably have asked specifically under the rationale that the relevant government agencies.

Here is MDBG Dictionary's (significantly more amusig) translation:

Embarrassed, me not this table! About this possibility you must under the inquiry be supposed specially the item of related government apparatus.

Now, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that these online Chinese-English translators often produce such humurous results because most of these words just don't have perfect one-to-one translations. The meaning is totally context-specific, and even the good folks at Google have yet to produce a translator intelligent enough to fully understand context and shape its results appropriately.

Now here's MY translation:

Sorry, I don't have a copy of this form you want. Regarding your best course of action, you might want to inquire with someone in a position of knowledge or authority in the government.

Matt's all-purpose, low-fat Chinese food recipe

Matt's low-fat, all-purpose Chinese food recipe

1. Prepare some noodles or rice.

The default rice and noodle in China are both plain white. But you can find other rices and noodles if you look in the right places.

2. Mince some garlic

China is the world's number one producer of garlic. Growing up I was always told that it was Gilroy, but I now think that was just a marketing ploy.

3. Grate some fresh ginger

4. Chop up some vegetables.

In my case, I used baby bok choy and mushrooms. Baby bok choy is not the "designer vegetable" I think it is in American supermarkets, but an inexpensive staple. In fact, domestically produced produce in China is very inexpensive. My local supermarket also carries a long line of organic produce, which is about twice as expensive as the non-organic, but still cheaper than in the United States. The grocery store's basic mushroom is brown and more flavorful than the basic white mushrooms in the United States.

5. Combine water, corn starch, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and any other sauces of your choosing.

I almost always use soy sauce and vinegar, but when it comes to additional flavors you can mix it up. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of ready-made sauces to choose from in the supermarket. I usually use some form of chili sauce.

6. Heat some oil in the wok. Add, one by one, the garlic, ginger, vegetables, and sauce, constantly and vigorously stirring.

I stopped using my long-handled spatula because it was flicking food all over the kitchen. Now I use a bamboo spoon, which lets me stir with greater accuracy and force. This is the same basic procedure that is used on woks across China, but it usually involves a lot of oil. I don't use much oil, so I need to be extra vigilant in the stirring to keep it from burning. But it's usually okay because the vegetables give off so much liquid that the stir-fry becomes nice and saucy, which is perfect for serving over rice or noodles.

China Blog March 16: Leaning Chinese

I've been living in Shanghai and attending language classes for two whole weeks now. That means I'm already one-sixth of the way through my twelve-week program. I have a feeling this time will fly really quickly. At this point, I'm almost sure I'll return to China after a month at home or so. Because I feel like I'm on a roll, having made real progress in Mandarin in a short period of time. And I'm really enjoying it. I'm getting a lot of positive reinforcement, and I don't want to let up for too long of a break. If I keep seeing progress at the rate I've felt it in the last couple weeks, then I think a good year or so of study could maybe make me functionally fluent. I have to admit, I'm being a really good language student right now. I dont spend every hour of the day on Mandarin, but I spend a lot more than the four hours I'm in class.

New students may arrive at ACLS (the Academy of Language Studies) on any week, and rather than starting a new class from scratch, they give you a placement test and throw you into an already-in-progress class. It might sound bad, but I think it makes sense. This company has several hundred students at their two campuses in Beijing, but the Shanghai branch, which is much newer, only has about thirteen students right now. Those thirteen are divided into about five different classes at different skill levels. Those classes' progress is measured by where they are in the series of textbooks the school uses. I got put in not the lowest, but second-lowest level, which was on Chapter Eleven of Book One. My classmates are from France and England. Our teacher remarked that, between the four of us, we represent 80% of the UN security council. There is some vocabulary and grammar they've learned that I haven't yet learned, but catching up is not too difficult. Luckily, I've discovered that I have a knack for memorizing characters quickly. I have a drill book for writing them over and over again, and I use flashcards to test myself.

Since arriving in Shanghai, I've learned that Beijing is generally revered as the best place in China to learn Mandarin because that's where Putonghua (the common, or standard, dialect of China) is geographically based. That's where more of the serious language students go, they say, while those more interested in pursuing business opportunities or the social scene come to Shanghai. Hmm. I definitely didn't know that before I came here. But I still think I like the city of Shanghai (language offerings aside) better than Beijing for a variety of reasons (which I'll discuss later).

I've also found that it's not too difficult to just go out in the city and meet actual Chinese people to practice with. And that's exactly what I've been doing! All I have to do is go to a park or public place with some Chinese homework in hand. People will approach me and start a conversation. Needless to say, making friends here is not difficult. Today I finally acquired a bicycle. How did I get it? It was loaned to me by a girl I met yesterday in People's Square. She doesn't use it, so she let me have it for the next ten weeks. The best language partners for me are probably those who who are native Chinese speakers, but who also speak some English. That way the relationship is more reciprocal, and we can both help each other. I can try to speak as much as possible in Chinese, but when I hit a wall, they can help me figure out what I'm trying to say, and write it down for me in my notepad. I have had some conversations with some Chinese speakers who don't speak any English at all. Usually we can fumble along, not always understanding each other 100%, but still understanding enough. But usually after a while we'll run out of things to say. It's great practice though, and functions as great reinforcement to know that Chinese people can actually understand my speech and pronunciation. I'm glad, because I pay a great deal of attention to the intonation. The sounds of the Chinese syllabary are not that difficult, and are far less numerous than the universe of sounds pronounced in the English language. But the tones definitely add several layers of difficulty. I still have a lot of trouble distinguishing the tones when I hear them spoken, but I've gotten better at pronouncing them, and at pronouncing a string of them in succession. Chinese people speak so quickly that much of the intonation seems to even out, but the meaning of the sounds can still be inferred through the context.

In class, my classmates and I are able to carry on conversations in Chinese. Our teacher, Ting Ting, is about the same age as us. Her lesson plans are formulaic and cyclical, with the same activities and drills repeated in each lesson (chapter). But that's not a problem, because I think the activities and drills are well-designed and a productive use of time. We are forced to do a lot of speaking, much of it in dialogues, questions, and sentences using the new vocabulary and grammar we've learned. In one activity, for example, Ting Ting will write all the new characters we've learned in a lesson on the white board, and we are then forced to create a dialogue between us making use of those characters, She crosses them out as they're used, and the dialogue isn't over until every one is crossed out. There's a lot more time for me to get speaking time in class than in the classes at COM because there are only three students. The pace is also much faster. We start a new chapter every 1.5 - 2 days. On the Friday of my second week, we finished Book One and this week we start Book Two.

The staff at the school is very friendly and helpful. As anyone who knows me knows, I do ask lots of questions, and I'm lucky that the teachers at my school are happy to indulge my habit. They've helped me translate emails and text messages I couldn't fully translate myself, and helped me figure out how to say things I want to say to shopowners, bus drivers, etc.

But whenever I translate something, I try to do it on my own before asking for help. This can be a painstaking business if there are lots of characters I don't know. Sometimes I think I recognize a character because it contains several familiar components, but a one stroke difference can completely change the meaning of the character. There's hardly a sentence I encounter anymore in which I don't know at least some of the characters. So the rest is a game of filling in the blanks. I've got several tools at my disposal: my hand-held electronic dictionary, my hard copy dictionary, my textbook, my notepad, and the internet. I'll input the unknown character into my hand-held and hopefully it will appear. This is more difficult if the character I'm trying to read is handwritten or printed in a strange font. Most Chinese handwriting I've encountered is like chicken scratch to my eyes. They're scribbled so quickly and without the pen leaving the page, similar to our cursive handwriting, rendering the unique elements and brushstrokes of the characters unrecognizable to my eyes. Some of the fonts, too, distort the look of the strokes. Chinese characters, just like the letters of the Roman Alphabet, can be written in an infinite number of fonts. A common font used in business signs has the characters in really wide, bubble-like shapes, very compressed together and overlapping. I find those ones quite difficult to read. I've discovered that my MacBook comes even comes equipped with more than one font for Chinese characters. This is my favorite:

华文楷体,

The above characters are the name of the font, and translate as "brilliant character regular script".

Since beginning class I've had to teach myself the names of all the different brush strokes (there are about twenty-five, though many of those are two-or-three stroke combinations of other, more basic, strokes). One nice thing about the above font is that you can see a subtle variation in the thickness of each stroke. This tells you the direction of the stroke, if it were being drawn by a traditional brush (where the brush first touches the paper is the thickest, and gradually tapers off until the brush leaves the paper).

My hand-held dictionary is not complete, and it sometimes fails to recognize the characters I input. This often happens with some of the more obscure characters which are only used as family names. I've met two Chinese people so far who have told me that even other Chinese people have difficulty reading their name, because the character for it is so obscure. One recounted how when she was in school, her teachers often mispronounced her name, but she wasn't supposed to correct them in front of the other students because it would cause her teacher to lose face. She said people often assume that her parents are very educated because how else could they have chosen such a name.

Growing up in America, my understanding of the Chinese language was that every character represented a single word, and that every word could be expressed in one character. This is not true. Many characters do not represent complete words, or rather, they represent forms of words that are not in common usage today, but are used in combination with other characters to form modern meanings. Many words are made up of multiple characters, sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes even more. In this way, Chinese is much more versatile than a one-to-one system would allow for. Read together, the four characters

不好意思 mean "embarrassed" or "embarrassment". But broken into their individual components, the meaning is "no good feeling". But the Chinese way of putting characters with their own unique meanings into multiple-character words is often highly logical and practical. Take the following six words, all meaning a type of vehicle, as an example. The basic unit, 车 (chē) means vehicle. The others all add additional characters to 车. The meanings of the added characters on their own may have nothing to do with transportation, but when the idea they represent is combined with the idea of vehicle, they make perfect sense.

1. Vehicle 车 chē

2. Train 火车 huǒchē (huǒ = "fire")

3. Bicycle 自行车 zìxíngchē (zìxíng = "by oneself")

4. Car 汽车 qìchē (qì = "gas")

5. Taxi 出租汽车 chūzūqìchē (chūzū = "to rent out")

6. Bus 公共汽车 gōnggòngqìchē (gōnggòng = "public")

If I'm out and about and need to know Chinese word, I can input the English word in my hand-held dictionary and hope for the best. Often, though, it gives me several Chinese words to choose from, and I have no way of knowing which one works best in context. If I have a computer and internet in front of me, I might google the different Chinese words and see which one has more search results. I figure that's a rough measure of which word is more commonly used, and for now I'm happy using the most common vocabulary and leaving the more obscure stuff for later. My hard copy dictionary also contains more examples of the usage of words in sentences, which can help to add context to the meaning.

Carrying notepads with me wherever I go is essential because I'm always finding things to write down. I like to write down characters I see on signs, menus, and products, and then translate them later. The following example is from a warning sign at a construction site:

不戴安全帽

不准进入工地

First I looked up all the characters I didn't know. Some of them I already knew in their individual usages, but not in their compound usages as determined here.

戴 dài to put on, to wear (glasses, hat, gloves)

安全 ān quán safe, secure, safety

帽 mào hat

准 zhǔn to allow, to permit

进入 jìn rù to enter

工地 gōng dì construction site

The above definitions are from my hand-held dictionary. If you simply pieced together the one-to-one translations of each character, you'd have what people call Chinglish. I think a lot of the bizarre signs visitors find so amusing in China are achieved precisely through this method. Someone ran the Chinese words through a dictionary, using the literal English one-to-one translations, in the same order in which they appear in Chinese. The literal translation of this would be "No wear safety hat, no allow enter construction site". That's pretty understandable. Its not as weird as some of them translations you see in China. But it still is not proper English, because Chinese has no article and often leaves out pronouns. Thus, a passable English translation would be something like:

"Not wearing a safety hat? Then you're not permitted to enter the construction site!"

Here's an easy one:

中国制造 Zhōngguó Zhìzào "Made in China"

I have two notebooks, one pocket size, one that I carry in my backpack, in which I keep essential words that I often want to use in conversations but have not yet memorized. This gives me a quick reference that I can use on the fly. I also make flash cards for all the characters I learn, so that I can drill myself and memorize them.

I've found that words I've just learned in class keep on popping up outside of class. That's really exciting. It makes me think that the vocabulary in our textbook is very well-chosen. That said, there are lots of words that I find I want to use but haven't yet learned, so I figure them out on my own, run them by my teacher, and then add them to my notebooks. The vocabulary I'm learning also seems to be curiously applicable to my life. For example, we learned about health and medicine the week I was having horrible headaches, and I used the new vocabulary I learned to get some Chinese medicine, which ended a ten-day streak of headaches.

China Blog March 10, 2009: Living in Shanghai

Sitting right now in Citta Espresso Cafe again. Just read the NY Times' frontpage story on the Dalai Lama's recent harsh criticisms of China. Totally uncensored. This is good. What the article talked about...that's not so good. I wish China's leaders weren't as paranoid about "social unrest" as they are. More on that later. This is the same cafe where I came for internet when I first arrived in Shanghai 5 weeks ago. Now I should be able to use it in my apartment, but it's having problems, so I'm here for now. I've learned to get by without constant internet access, and its not the end of the world. But I prepare lots of stuff that needs being online to accomplish, so my time here at the cafe is a serious work session. Its definitely a nice place. Same prices as Starbucks but nicer ambiance, and free wifi (Starbucks doesn't offer).
I researched how to ask about the wifi connection myself in Chinese:

有没有无线电因特网联接？免费吗？
Yǒu méiyǒu wúxiàndiàn Yīntèwǎng liánjiē? Miǎnfèide ma?
Do you have a wireless internet connection? Is it free?

The only downside is the staff here seems to be hard-wired to speak to speak to me in English. I ask in Chinese, they respond in English. Not very helpful. That's why I prefer non-expat places, where speaking to clerks, waiters, and staff is good practice. Scanning around the room, the clientele looks about half Chinese, half expat. It dawned on me, if I'm going to be teaching English in China, is this what I am going to be training Chinese students to do...wait on expats in cafes? Oh, but I guess I shouldn't be snooty. I didn't complain when I encountered so many English speaking staff as I backpacked around Europe or India (or China for that matter). Maybe where I start to feel a little tingle of ego is when I see how many permanent residents of Shanghai either cannot, or refuse to, speak Chinese or engage with Chinese people in Chinese. Tourists its a little more excusable. But if you're living here and you can barely speak a word of Chinese, well...words like "sad", "presumptuous", and "lazy" come to mind. But there are lots of them here.

But even in a place that caters to expats, there are good things to report. The Chinese gentleman behind me just helped me solve a problem that's been perplexing me for months. My computer is set up so that I can input pinyin (the roman alphabet) and choose from a pop-up window the correct Chinese characters. But for some reason, I'd never been able to find certain words, like the word for woman, or travel. Those words in pinyin are spelled with an umlauted "ǔ". Turns out that you can't just type "nuren" or "luxing". Instead, you type the umlauted "ǔ" as a "v", and all your problems are solved!

It's been several days since I've had a chance to write here, and that's because I've been so busy now that I'm a full-time student again. There never seem to be enough hours in the day. I'm keeping myself very busy, rising at 6 every morning to make it to my school by 8.

I had one weekend to move into my apartment before starting classes, and because that wasn't enough to acquire all the stuff I needed, I spent the first several afternoons running errands, collecting things for the apartment. That times adds up, especially with transportation added in. I love Shanghai's public transportation system (I have a rechargeable card that I swipe on the subway, buses, and even taxis, which are necessary after 11 when the subway shuts down), but it still takes a while to get around. Shanghai is the largest city in China, after all.

It's funny. When I was traveling last month I wondered if I'd have enough to say to fill this blog once I stopped traveling and started living in the same place. Well, it turns out I have much more to say now that I'm geographically grounded. That shouldn't be surprising. When traveling, my impressions were based on fleeting glimpses. I have a long way to go before I can claim to dissect Shanghai's urban milieu with any authority (in fact, it won't ever happen), but once you start walking down the same street more than once, you do start to notice things you didn't notice at first.

Because I have so much to say, I'm going to organize it by category. Index is below. It will probably take me several days to get this all published. But rest assured, lots more is forthcoming (and in fact already filtering through drafts). I'll issue a warning right now that the first chapter on "domestic life" may be a bit boring to non-immediate friends and family, so keep that in mind, and you won't hurt my feelings if you skip it :)

• First Topic: Domestic life in and around the apartment.
• Second Topic: Learning Mandarin, and my language school
• Third Topic: Insights and philosophical musings

First Topic: Domestic life in and around the apartment.

The wifi in my apartment worked fine at first, but trouble I got in touch with my landlord (by SMS, and entirely in Chinese, for she speaks no English) and she had two guys show up at my place within the hour, install a new router or something, and then the internet worked (but on ethernet, not wireless). Now it only works infrequently, and poorly at that. It's not really the end of the world. My school has computer consoles, and a number of wifi hotspots are available in my neighborhood for the price of a coffee (or bummed for free if I don't mind sitting outside a cafe, laptop on my lap, with people starring at me). I do plan to address the problem in the apartment, but I need a bit more time to troubleshoot and try to translate a detailed account of what's wrong. I've found that patience is key to communicating what I want to say in Chinese. More on that in Topic 2.

I spent the first several days adding needed things to my apartment. I'm still looking for a couple items, namely a bike. But my apartment is starting to fell like home. And I've fallen into a routine. I wake up every weekday morning at 6:10 am, leaving the apartment by 7:10 in order to catch the 7:20 bus, which gets me to my school at 7:50, in time for the start of class at 8:00. It's the earliest I've consistently had to get up ever in my life. I like Chinese food, but have never been satisfied with Chinese breakfasts. While on the road, it can be difficult to eat a Western breakfast, but now that I have an apartment it is easy. I keep my pantry and refrigerator stocked with fresh fruit, hot cereal, cold cereal, milk, eggs, fresh-baked artisan breads, and jam. Yes folks, it's all available right here in Shanghai, and right across my street at the Carrefour.

I'm in class from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm each day, giving me an entire afternoon to spend up to my own inclination every day. I'll use it to do errands, or return to my apartment and study. Weather has been cold, wet, and dreary most of the last week, but two days the sun came out and now public parks and squares can be nice places to pass the time, or do homework. The streets around my apartment are always full of people, but this past Sunday there were more people than I had ever seen. I'm sure that was a combination of the fact that it was Sunday, when the weekly street markets open, and that it was the first beautiful day in a month. Getting around took a considerable amount of patience, but I found that simply going with the flow and joining the crowd was the best bet.

I do laundry frequently because I often come home with cigarette smell on my clothes because smoking is permitted in most dining and drinking establishments. Luckily, I've got a washing machine in my room, and its small so I can do frequent loads. There is a rack all the way across my ceiling from which I can hang my laundry indoors. There are also laundry poles outside my room, accessed by a hook on the end of a long pole, but I have yet to use them because I've been keeping my windows sealed shut due to the cold weather. In fact, my windows leaked so bad that I sealed them all up with duct tape, and I don't want to remove it until the weather warms up for good. The heater in my room is not the most efficient, and I'm weary of running up too steep a utility bill, so I wear a lot of layers around the house. The base temperature is 13° C, or 54° F. Today's sunshine boosted that base temperature to 18° C, or 64° F. My many windows, which nearly stretch from wall to wall, mean my apartment is more vulnerable to cold air seeping in from outside, but it also creates a nice greenhouse effect when its sunny out.

Other problems have emerged with the apartment. My shower has been filling up with water and overflowing onto the bathroom floor because its not draining fast enough. There's an electric pump which is supposed to take care of that problem, but it doesn't work fast enough. Not really sure why I should need a drain pump on the Sixth Floor...I thought that's what gravity's for. In any case, my mother would be proud of me. Yesterday I got down on my hands and knees, cleaned out the drain, and did some scrubbing while I was at it. It made a difference. I also noticed some workers today cleaning out the sewers of the apartment complex down at street level. Maybe that will also help alleviate the problem.

My kitchen is simple, but I've been making the most of it. Provided are a sink, microwave, hood, and a single inversion cooktop. I acquired a dish drainer, plates, bowls, glasses, knife, grater, cutting board, peeler, spatula, wooden (bamboo) spoon, saucepan, strainer, and wok. It's enough to cook up most things. I can't do any baking, but that's fine because there are bakeries all over the city. In my first week, I've made from scratch: chow mein, stir-fried ginger bok choy over rice, stir-fried garlic spinach over rice, and fried rice.

I'd never heard of an inversion cooker before. It functions as a stove but its physical properties are very different from those of a conventional cooktop (electric or gas). The cooking surface itself never heats up. Instead, it uses electromagnetism to heat the pan resting on its surface (meaning that pots made of magnetic material is essential). The result is more energy-efficient, not to mention faster.

I don't drink the tap water. Instead, I refill my 5-litre jug at a vending machine at the entrance to my apartment complex. It costs 1 RMB (15 cents) for 5 litres. Lugging it back up the sixth floors isn't too bad. I had to lug a lot more during my shopping spree last week.
My teacher says living on the sixth floor is considered good luck. I just think it's good exercise!

Other things that can be refilled? I have a rechargeable metro card that works like a debit card on every form of transportation in Shanghai: subways, buses, and even taxis! My mobile phone uses a SIM card that I can recharge by calling a number and entering a code on the purchased recharge card (recharge cards are literally available everywhere - if not in shops, then from myriad street peddlers).

There must be at least a few thousand residents in my apartment complex (which itself consists of more than ten seven-floor buildings). So far I have yet to see a non-Chinese person in the complex. That doesn't mean there aren't any. I just haven't seen them yet. During the last couple days' of good weather, the old ladies of the complex have started spending more time outdoors, sunning themselves in folding chairs on the driveway. These dense apartment buildings probably predate the era of rapid car ownership in Shanghai, but the pavement is definitely beginning to fill up with cars. Sometimes they squeeze themselves into some difficult maneuvering space. The fact that there are so many cars in this complex signals that this must be a middle class place by Shanghai standards. Even though the apartments are not as nice as some of the taller and more modern high-rises around, if other people are paying rent anywhere similar to mine, then they must have pretty decent incomes.

In fact, I think I'm pretty lucky to be living where I am. It's the first time in my life that I've really lived alone. In college I had a single three out of four years, but it was a single in a dormitory where I had few responsibilities. In grad school I had the responsibilities of a renter, but I also shared them with roommates. Now I'm by myself in an apartment in the big city. And I like it! It definitely makes me feel a bit more adult. And now that I'm 26, I should probably start getting accustomed to feeling like an adult. I've met two of my floor-mates. Both are young (20- or 30-something) Chinese. One speaks English fluently. I see a lot of other young people heading to work at the same time as I head to school in the morning. I'm guessing the higher floors have more young people because they're in better physical condition.

to be continued...

My neighborhood

Satellite image by Google Maps ©
I added some labels to this image (click to enlarge) to show how conveniently located my apartment is.
The neighborhood is called Zhongshan Park, named after the lovely public park you see on the map. The area is full of high-end residential high-rises and shopping centers, and three major subways all converge at the subway station, giving the area excellent access to the rest of Shanghai. Given all this, I think I was quite lucky to get the apartment I did.

My apartment building is probably one of the oldest and least luxurious that you see here on this satellite image. Whereas most buildings around here are just a few years old, my building probaby dates to the 80s, and it is showing significant signs of wear. Yet it is tucked directly behind the Cloud Nine Shopping Center, giving it an excellent location. To reach my building, I enter the apartment complex directly behind the shopping center, and then walk to the farthest of the ten towers. My apartment is on the sixth and topmost floor. To reach the subway station, I can walk through the shopping center if it's cold or raining out.

Within a five minute walk from my apartment one can find:
Carrefour Supermarket
Starbucks
Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf
Coldstone Creamery
Häagen Dazs
Papa Johns

Not that I really patronize or need any of these establishments. They're all more expensive than their American counterparts. There are hundreds of other shops and restaurants, too, many of them Chinese chains. They're usually cheaper than the foreign ones, but not always. China's indigenous coffee shop chains are just as expensive as Starbucks.