Monday, June 4, 2012

Oh, Shanghai

Tomorrow I will have been in Shanghai for two weeks.  And two weeks from today I'm flying back to the United States!  What an adventure this year in China has been.  I'm glad I will have this fairly comprehensive (if spotty in consistency) record of my time here.

New developments in work: I've been busier at DLA than I was at LexField.  Lots of documents to edit, and I got to sit in on and help translate a bit of a training we hosted for some startup companies here.  Some of their business models were interesting, but for the most part they had absolutely no idea how to explain themselves or present their pitches.  I went in and out of the meetings, but from the snippets I caught I wasn't terribly impressed.

My longish-term project I'm doing for Kaichen is an analysis of what might happen to private/foreign investments in China if the government collapses or undergoes a radical transformation in the near future, based on similar events in Indonesia and other places.  I haven't done much research on it yet, but it's looking interesting so far.

Ben, Seth, Jonathan, Chandler, Sisi Messick and I went clothes shopping on Saturday.  But not just to the store.  No, sir.  We went to the fabric market and got fitted and picked out styles and buttons and sleeves and the whole shebang!  Sisi was our fashion coach.  We each got several dress shirts, long and short-sleeved, Ben and Chandler got suits, and Seth got a cashmere coat made, all at ridiculously cheap prices!  My long-sleeved shirts were 100 kuai (just over $15) and short-sleeved were 90 kuai.  The suits and coat were 500 kuai, or $80!  I really liked the cashmere coat, but I couldn't justify buying one, since I already have a winter coat and a peacoat and a trench coat, and I certainly won't need any of them very often at Stanford.  But still.  I spent just over $100 on 6 fitted dress shirts!  On our way out, we bought ties - silk ties for 8 kuai ($1.25) each!  Crazy.  Then we went to the pearl market and Seth and I bought some shorts and Ben bought some shoes, again for ridiculously cheap prices.  I'm glad Hannah and Brent are moving here next year - if I ever need any dress clothes, I'll make sure to have them buy them in Shanghai.

The Shanghai Branch is really good to the YSAs here - every Sunday a member has the whole group over for dinner after church.  Yesterday was at Sister Wang's house.  She's Taiwanese and married to a man who's not a member of the church, and they're both super nice.  There were 7 of us who went, and she had more than enough food for everyone; really good angel hair pasta, green curry with rice, salad, fresh whole grain bread with butter...and decadent chocolate cake for dessert!  Sooooooo good!  Her husband worked for Singapore Airlines in marketing for 30 years, and now he lives here and studies Mandarin while she works in interior design.  I'm so grateful for people like that who open up their homes and make young singles feel welcome and at home.

Ben left this morning for Hong Kong; I won't see him again until I maybe see him in July in Utah, depending on how my plans work out.  Everyone is going their separate ways in the next few weeks; Seth finished his internship on Thursday, and Chandler is done and traveling around already.  Joel and Jonathan finish this week, I think.  I'm glad to be so nearly done with the two-year endurance race this Flagship program has turned out to be, but I'm also a little nostalgic for all the good times we had together and everything I experienced over this two years.  If I had to do it over again, I think I would choose to come, despite (maybe because of?) the hard times, because of the friends I've made and the things I've learned about China and about myself.

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