Oddly enough, Twitter has been on my mind all day. I used to find Twitter’s concept foolish, self-indulgent, and pointless. This year, though, a friend who is a Twitter enthusiast convinced me to give it a chance. Now, I still think it may be self-indulgent, but sometimes self-indulgent is what you want, and I’ve found myself to enjoy tweeting! All of the random thoughts that pop into my mind? Tweet them! Twitter is the perfect outlet for miscellaneous ideas, observations, and opinions that I want to just get out there. Since I don’t have many followers, it’s a good thing I don’t really care if people pay them much mind.
Anyway, how does Twitter relate to Shanghai and my travels? Well… today as I roamed the city alone, I was bombarded by many of these little thoughts. I wanted so badly to tell someone, but I was alone, so my instinct was to reach for my Blackberry and tweet them. However, as I’m Blackberry-less in Shanghai, I couldn’t even tweet them, I cemented some of them in my mind. If you don’t want to read the long version, here’s what I would have tweeted if I could tweet. Basically, it’s my day in 140-character bursts.
3pm – Finally woke up… I guess I was tired J
6pm – Mission obtain Chinese cell phone accomplished! (I wish I could use SIM cards with Verizon phones.)
6:22pm – Alone. With nobody to talk to I’ve found myself narrating in my head. Like Carrie from Sex and the City or J.D. from Scrubs.
7:30pm – Dusk has fallen. In Shanghai, you cannot see a SINGLE star!
7:45pm – The Beijing “er” that I picked up from my Chinese teachers is confusing the Shanghai ren! Ai-ya
8:00pm – I forgot how cosmopolitan Shanghai is…and how many waiguoren there are.
8:01pm – My tweets are already turning into Chinglish. I’ll translate for my dad and other non-Chinese speakers: waiguoren = foreigners
8:45pm – check it out: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/06/04/pew.interracial.marriage/index.html?hpt=C1 (Shanghai is chock-full of interracial couples)
10:30pm – Late night dinner. Delicious “Welcome to Shanghai” meal at Mr. and Mrs. Bund… a fancy French restaurant.
12am – cocktails on the balcony overlooking the Bund with a couple of Harvard friends. Fabulous!
1:15am – Shanghai this summer is the perfect mix of adventure and familiarity.
3:02am – Shanghai, not New York, is truly the City That Never Sleeps.
3:58am – Whoops! I just drank tap water while brushing my teeth. Let’s hope its filtered… or else it might be “Hello, Cipro!”
3:59am – actually I think I drank the water when I brushed yesterday too, and I haven’t gotten sick so far. Fingers crossed.
4:54am – Light is streaming through my window. Why can’t I fall asleep? Sleepless in Shanghai.
5:20am – I may as well get started on my journal/blog.
To elaborate on my tweets:
Even though I spent much of both flights sleeping, I still slept for a good 13 hours Friday night. After waking up at 3pm, I showered and set off on my first Shanghai adventure. Armed with mental snapshots of GoogleMaps, I managed to achieve my three objectives: 1) Find a China Construction Bank ATM; 2) Get a metro card; 3) Buy a cell phone and Chinese SIM card.
Unable to find the ATM for quite a while, my day was off to a late and an inauspicious start. However, as I wandered down Nanjingxi Lu, I was struck by déjà vu as my surroundings suddenly started to look familiar. I soon realized that I was walking down the same street of the hotel I stayed at with my family years ago during my first trip to Shanghai. Passing the imposing Ritz-Carlton was oddly comforting, I suppose because it is ironically the piece of Shanghai I am best acquainted with. How ironic, seeing as how this time I’ll be on my own, without my family, and certainly not in such luxurious accommodations.
After encountering the familiar, everything began to fall into place. I found an ATM, took the subway, and got my phone! By the time I headed back to my apartment, dusk had fallen.
Now that I have a phone, I can get in touch with my friends who are already here! Harvard students have been flocking to China in droves over the past couple of years. I suppose you could say it’s in vogue. A friend who lived across the hall from my freshman year was actually on my flight from San Francisco! And he’s living quite nearby.
After activating my phone, my first phone call was to my friend Henry. (We took Chinese together, so I know him best as Hangfei.) I haven’t seen him in awhile, since he’s been studying abroad in Shanghai. Luckily this means he can give me the lowdown on the city J (And show me his apartment… complete with an adorable two-week year old kitten!)
To celebrate my arrival in Shanghai, we had a late-night dinner at Mr. & Mrs. Pudong (and I’m talking LATE-night… our reservation was for 10:30pm!). Actually, I’m flattering myself… the dinner was initially to show another Harvard friend, Casra, Pudong during his weekend visit to the city. Once I was invited to tag along, though, it turned into a mini-reunion of sorts.
The restaurant was an incredibly chic French-owned place, right on the side of the river. After enjoying our delicious meals, Casra treated us to espressos so that we wouldn’t fall asleep on him! (He wanted to make the most of his short time here, but Henry and I were waning.) Getting our second wind, we went out onto the balcony overlooking Pudong and shared some cocktails. While the maitais were the most delicious, the “Diva on the Bund” was certainly the most amusing. We had the balcony all to ourselves, and sitting in the cool breeze in such a foreign and exciting place, yet with familiar friends was the perfect mix.
Henry, Casra, and I on the balcony overlooking the Bund. (It was late enough that the lights had been turned off for the most part.)
The cab dropped me off around 3am, but I still haven’t been able to fall asleep. I tried to fall asleep to my audio book. The voice is usually soothing enough to put me right to sleep, but no such luck this time! Before I knew it, light was sneaking in through the gap in my curtains. The silver lining? I got a few nice photos of daybreak and mustered up enough grit to start writing (the first sentence is the hardest for me). It’s now 6:31am and I’m still Sleepless in Shanghai!
View of daybreak from my window on the 19th floor.
Oh well… I’m just going to stay up so I crash early tomorrow and get back on a human sleep schedule.
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