First Day Fun in Shanghai

大家好! Today was a really fun day! Being that it was the first official day of classes it was pretty interesting. I started my day off by eating a really nice meal my host mom made us which included rice porridge, boiled eggs, grapes, and cold milk which is pretty rare in China. After breakfast me and my roomie took the train and the bus to school by ourselves for the first time. I think we did pretty good since we didn’t get lost and made it to the 毛像 (Mao Xiang statue) on time.

Today in class we were assigned our language groups we met our lovely teacher 徐老师。Today we learned how to introduce ourselves so we can use it later during our community assignment. And then we ate lunch at the school cafeteria (食堂 shi tang). It was very crowded but my program leader helped me order beef noodles and passionfruit milk tea. They both were very delicious.

For our community assignment we visited the Urban Planning Museum which was very cool because we saw a lot of futuristic things about 上海 and a model of the city, it is huge!  Afterwards we went to the Bund, and saw a nice view of downtown 上海 it was amazing. Here we had to interview the locals and ask them about what we learned in class, such as discussing yourself.

I also was stopped to take a lot of pictures being that I’m a foreigner which was pretty cool because it gave me more opportunities to interact with locals.

After all of that, my roommate and I went to the McDonalds in our subway station to go home. It was so good and a nice reminder of home. It was interesting to see they don’t sale barbecue sauce as an option with your chicken nuggets, but everything else was basically the same. I had an awesome first day and I can’t wait to see what else is in store for the rest of the program! Aaniyah Childs

Written By: Aaniyah Childs

Chicago, IL (Lindblom Math and Science Academy)