I love Shanghai!
I'm sure there will be things I don't like about it eventually, but for now it's great. Ben and Seth rent a room in a house in a cool section of town with little alleys and shops and tree-lined residential streets. Quite the opposite of our apartment in Beijing, which was off a main street with lots of big buildings everywhere and a lot of traffic. It's been cloudy/rainy since I got here, which can get depressing after a while, I guess, but I love the rain and had far too little of it in Beijing, so that's another plus!
With the air mattress I brought, more than half the floor space is taken up by beds now. We have a small table in the corner and a closet and a TV, but the rest of the apartment is mattresses and bedding. Still nowhere near as crowded as a Chinese dorm room, but we can pretend we're living in cramped squalor. :)
My commute to work is about 45 minutes - 6 stops on the subway and a good walk on either end. I work in the Shanghai World Financial Center, the second-tallest building IN THE WORLD!!! We're on the 36th floor, which is very cool, even though I don't have a window in my office.
So I'm working for DLA Piper for 3.5 weeks. They're an international law firm and the largest firm in the world, with thousands of attorneys and over 70 offices in over 30 countries. They mostly do corporate/transactional work. I've been helping do a little research and some editing over the past few days, and my main project is coming up with a framework for understanding the changes that will happen to foreign-owned property and businesses if the Chinese government were to collapse or be radically altered in some way. Kind of cool!
This is a super nice building. The toilets are the Japanese kind with a multitude of buttons, water jets, seat warmers, etc etc. Our one conference room has glass walls that can be turned opaque at the flip of a switch. My computer monitor is huge, and the internet is lightning fast and has a built-in VPN, so it's basically like being back in the States (or heaven, take your pick)!
I get off at 6:30. Commuting is pretty painless here, even at rush hour. It can be crowded, but the escalators and everything else move pretty quickly. Very efficient. Ben and Seth tend to get home fairly late, Seth later than Ben, so unlike in Beijing where we would hang out with people most weeknights, here they only do things on the weekends. That might get monotonous after a while, but since I'm only here for 3.5 weeks anyway, I don't think I'll mind. I probably won't try to get to know the branch/YSA very well in any case.
Food is really expensive here. Maybe about the same as Beijing, but there are way more foreign restaurants that charge exorbitant prices, so it seems more expensive. Especially where I work - there are no cheap places to eat around here, so it's pay up or starve.
I'm sure there will be things I don't like about it eventually, but for now it's great. Ben and Seth rent a room in a house in a cool section of town with little alleys and shops and tree-lined residential streets. Quite the opposite of our apartment in Beijing, which was off a main street with lots of big buildings everywhere and a lot of traffic. It's been cloudy/rainy since I got here, which can get depressing after a while, I guess, but I love the rain and had far too little of it in Beijing, so that's another plus!
With the air mattress I brought, more than half the floor space is taken up by beds now. We have a small table in the corner and a closet and a TV, but the rest of the apartment is mattresses and bedding. Still nowhere near as crowded as a Chinese dorm room, but we can pretend we're living in cramped squalor. :)
My commute to work is about 45 minutes - 6 stops on the subway and a good walk on either end. I work in the Shanghai World Financial Center, the second-tallest building IN THE WORLD!!! We're on the 36th floor, which is very cool, even though I don't have a window in my office.
So I'm working for DLA Piper for 3.5 weeks. They're an international law firm and the largest firm in the world, with thousands of attorneys and over 70 offices in over 30 countries. They mostly do corporate/transactional work. I've been helping do a little research and some editing over the past few days, and my main project is coming up with a framework for understanding the changes that will happen to foreign-owned property and businesses if the Chinese government were to collapse or be radically altered in some way. Kind of cool!
This is a super nice building. The toilets are the Japanese kind with a multitude of buttons, water jets, seat warmers, etc etc. Our one conference room has glass walls that can be turned opaque at the flip of a switch. My computer monitor is huge, and the internet is lightning fast and has a built-in VPN, so it's basically like being back in the States (or heaven, take your pick)!
I get off at 6:30. Commuting is pretty painless here, even at rush hour. It can be crowded, but the escalators and everything else move pretty quickly. Very efficient. Ben and Seth tend to get home fairly late, Seth later than Ben, so unlike in Beijing where we would hang out with people most weeknights, here they only do things on the weekends. That might get monotonous after a while, but since I'm only here for 3.5 weeks anyway, I don't think I'll mind. I probably won't try to get to know the branch/YSA very well in any case.
Food is really expensive here. Maybe about the same as Beijing, but there are way more foreign restaurants that charge exorbitant prices, so it seems more expensive. Especially where I work - there are no cheap places to eat around here, so it's pay up or starve.
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