It's been raining all day today, other than a nice big breakfast and a quick pop over to the knock-off mall to buy sunglasses, we're taking it easy for the afternoon. I've noticed that Shanghai doesn't smell so good when it rains- kind of a combination of wet dog and toxic chemicals. It's the sort of smell you can taste if you inhale too deeply, so I try to avoid breathing when possible. Much like last year, time is simultaneously crawling and flying. Yesterday w...

A few days into our trip, Ola stated that while last year was all about seeing stuff, this year was going to be all about eating. So far we've been doing justice to that proclamation. In addition to all my coworkers, my friends Phoebe, Nick and Mike, were visiting Shanghai this past week. This of course meant that we had to escalate the creative eating ventures. We went to the Dolar Shop for awesome hotpot, one of the places with all the ducks and pork bits hangi...

Exactly as we'd hoped, it's been an uneventful week and an eventful weekend. We got through our first week of classes fairly smoothly and, surprisingly, without casualty. Friday night was our "welcome dinner" which was much as I remember it from last year- replete with jelly fish and a chicken head. Apparently the more food brought to the table, the "friendlier" the gathering. Based on the over-abundance of leftovers, it was a very friendly meal. After the dinner...

It's a very strange feeling to travel 14.5 hours on a plane, get off on the other side of the world, and feel like the past year didn't happen. I guess I don't often return to a place with such close time proximity, but as Ola put it, we're feeling a little time warped. Aside from a desperate need for afternoon naps and humidity that has made my hair grow to three times its natural size, it kinda feels like we never left.Since we arrived, we've done very little a...

We've been slowly figuring out how to communicate and get things accomplished in Shanghai. My Mandarin skills, while improving, are still incredibly poor, so it's helpful to accompany attempts to speak with appropriate non-verbal signals; however, that's easier said than done. Today I learned, after several attempts, that making your hands look like they're skiing down a hill means "subway"; as you can imagine, this has already come in quite handy. Unfortunately ...