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 ...

I'm sitting on the bus heading to school for the last teaching day of my second cycle. It's just after 7am and the same Chinese radio show is playing; I can now sing along with a couple of the commercials- ba-ling-ling-er-ba-liu-ling-ba- I know it's a phone number, but have no idea what they're selling. I promised that I'd write about the good stuff, but to be perfectly honest I'm still kind of cranky. Living and working somewhere is not at all the same as back-p...