First Day Back in Shanghai

The first time I came to Shanghai (last summer) I had culture shock pretty bad, and it lasted for about 24 hours of being out of my mind. This time around is drastically different, I don’t even feel like I am in a foreign country. Also, I must be my recent trip navigating NYC, because this time in Shanghai it’s way easier for me to find my way around on a map, take the subway, etc.

Right now I am staying at the People’s Square Youth Hostel in the downtown area of Shanghai. Not a bad place but a little pricey for what I expected. (RMB 230 or $33 per night for the single room) The room is nice with it’s own bathroom, there’s free wifi and a sweet commons room with a bar (beer), pool table, and couches. Honestly, the accommodations are better than the two hotels I stayed at last year, with the exception the hostel doesn’t have the overpriced half-decent restaurant.

Basically I am having a kick-ass time in China.

Of course almost no trip is free of hassles: when I went to get on my flight in Boston I was forced to buy my return ticket in order to get on the plane (I hadn’t bought it because there were a lot of factors going into when I was going to go home, ie. if Devin and I had found an apartment in NYC, if I had to go back to Ames to ship my CampusBike’s, etc). Of course the ticket is going to be expensive because I can’t go through one of the discount websites ($1400 vs $900), so to get the fully refundable ticket I had to pay $2500. The woman told me I could get my refund at the United Airlines ticket counter in Shanghai or Beijing, so I planned to get my refund the second I touched down. But when I landed the ticket counter (and the supervisor as well) told me I have to get the refund from airport I bought it. (which is a load of BS as it’s impossible) I’ll be calling the customer service today to really give them a hard time and I’m going to expect to get something to make up for it.I was planning to leave Friday for Xi’an to visit Mengmeng, but since it is the 4th of July I am thinking about staying in Shanghai for some of the many expat events going on (SmartShanghai.com is a cool website to find stuff like this). I found out I can book a flight from Shanghai to Xi’an for less than the price of the train on CTRIP.com. So to save 18 hours I think I will do so.

Last night I met up with a friend from China who is doing her internship at a hospital in Shanghai’s Pudong area and we went out to the JZ Club bar. In China, medical school students never party, so we had a lot of fun.

That’s all for now.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under Summer 2008, Shanghai, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.