Nightclubs, Noodles, and No AC

So, now I've been in classes for almost two weeks. It's not that long, but it's a long time when I'll only be here for two weeks more. Everyone else in language classes arrived about a week after Krystal and I got here (as our program had originally told us the wrong dates, we both got here a week early). There are a lot of people from Europe, Korea, and the states. Within the foreign student population, there are also a lot of European overseas Chinese people - it was a new phenomenon for me to hear Chinese people walking around speaking Italian, Dutch, or French. I hang out with a relatively small group of people most of the time - Krystal and I still do most things together, along with a German girl named Christina, a French girl named Anne-Rachel, and a guy from Florida named Tyler. There are a couple of other people we tend to do things with, but it works out nicely to have a relatively small group of people to remember to invite whenever we go somewhere.

In terms of school, I got placed into the upper intermediate class, which seems to be about the right level. We have class for four hours every morning - two hours doing the new vocabulary and text, and two hours doing practice excercises. The first teacher is excellent - she speaks quickly but we all understand her, and she seems to have a pretty good idea of what level we're at so that she knows when she needs to stop and explain something. The second teacher is not so good - he speaks incredibly slowly, but still nobody can make much sense of him. It's partially because he has a really thick accent, and partially because he doesn't ever really explain the complicated grammatical terms he uses. For example, I went on for an entire class one time without realizing that we were talking about rhetorical questions because he just kept using the term for rhetorical question in Chinese without saying what it meant. I would have asked him what the term meant, except that it was always buried in a sentence full of other terms I didn't know, so it was hard to single out which part exactly I didn't understand so I could ask him about it. Most people just leave after the first two hours now - I'm one of the few suckers who always thinks that maybe today will be the day he says something enlightening. Anyway, I don't mean to come off too negative - I am learning a lot of new material and overall I think the program is pretty good.

Besides the struggle to get to the classroom at 8am and the 4 hours of class, my daily routine also consists largely of finding food. I've found some better food options nearby (with the help of other students) in the past week or two. There is a pedestrian mall the the south of campus where there are lots of small shops serving rice and noodles at all hours of the day. There is also one little shop run by a Chinese Muslim family that has hand-pulled noodles - I go there four or five times a week to get a steaming plate of lamb and noodles, and the owners are starting to recognize me and give me extra little dishes. When I just need some vegetables, there is a vaguely European restaurant on the same street as our dorm that has good Caesar salads and a combination of Western, Chinese, and Indonesian food and a nice atmosphere to sit down in for an hour or two - the noodle and rice shops are mostly in-eat-out type places. I've been lucky so far in that I haven't really had an upset stomach; all of the other people I hang out with seem to complain of vaguely disturbed stomachs about half the time and I eat at most of the same places that they do. I am taking care to eat vitamins and stay hydrated, so I think that generally helps my body out a bit, but other than that I'm just hoping that my luck will continue.

Speaking of luck, apparently the good stomach luck I was getting during the first week of class must have cancelled out any good housing luck that week - on Wednesday night we came back from a sweaty and smelly bar (see Zapata's, below) to find that our air conditioner had blown. This might have been due to the fact that we left it on 18 degrees Celsius (64 F) most of the time because of the blistering heat outside and the fact that we're on the 10th floor. However, we knew several people who left theirs on 15 C all day and their machines were still going strong. After sleeping through a restless and sticky night (despite two showers), I marched down to the front desk first thing in the morning and demanded that they do something about it. They said that they would call the air conditioner repairman, but it would be up to him when he could come. This went on for three days, during which I came to the desk every couple of hours and the attendant just shrugged and told me that the repairman said he would come that day, but that they couldn't do anything about it. The only rest we got during this time was when I plugged the AC into an extension cord and into another socket, resulting in a wondrous three hours of air conditioning before the AC blew the extension cord. Finally I just gave up on the existance of this fabled "air conditioner repairman" and demanded that they changed our room. After the usual progression of "we don't have any open rooms" to "ok, we have some rooms but I'm not authorized to move you, I have to talk to my boss who is (coincidentally) gone for the weekend" to "fine, just leave me alone, and here are your keys," I managed to secure us a new room on the same floor (and with a much better view). Of course, literally 5 minutes after we had just finished moving all of our stuff to the new room, the air conditioner repairman of legend triumphantly arrived. Lovely.

So what have I been up to when I haven't been searching the horizon for the AC repairman and making enemies among the front desk staff at my dorm? I haven't really been into the city as much in the daytime as I had before classes started, but I have started to go in a lot more at night. A lot of the other students are very into going out and trying all of the different bars. Frankly, a lot of them are idiots who just want to get plastered every night, but it is nice to have people scout out places around town and let us know which ones are worthwhile. One of my favorites so far is a jazz club called the Cotton Club, which is a small place with big plush chairs and a prety good house band. The band consists mostly of American expats with a couple of Chinese trumpet players, and the crowd seems to be a mix of well-off locals, expats, and some tourists. A block down is another jazz club called JZ, which attempts to pull off a bit more of an upmarket look with two levels and a lot of velvet draped around.

Wednesday night is ladies night at Zapata's, a "Mexican Cantina" where there is not a single Mexican (or Spanish-speaking) person on staff or anywhere to be seen. We went to ladies' night last week because it means free margheritas from 9pm to midnight and cheap(er) food. The place tends to get a bit sleazy, with mostly European and American tourists and expats getting completely wasted and dancing on the bar. Then there are the sketchy middle-aged businessmen who show up to leer at the twenty-something girls, and the prostitutes who show up to scout out the sketchy middle-aged businessmen. It makes for quite a scene, but after the free margheritas stop flowing it's not really worth sticking around.

Another sweaty and loud type place is Guandii, which we went to for a guy's 21st birthday. It is a hip-hop club that seems to mostly play radio hits from 6 months ago, with a lot of local clientele who are mostly embarrassingly uncoordinated. Not that I'm one to talk, considering my almost complete lack of rhythm. Anyway, I probably should have taken the opportunity to dance while I wouldn't have been the worst one on the floor, but I was content to sit outside on the patio and watch the birthday boy get a beer shower at midnight.

Before everyone else arrived, Krystal and I had checked out the prerequisite local Irish pub, O'Malley's. Admittedly, it was a Wednesday night, but the place was pretty dead, and there was some terribly off-key guy strumming his guitar and singing classic rock. We couldn't decide if he was being paid to entertain us or if the bar staff just weren't kicking him out. I do have to say that it scored a couple of points over Zapata's because they actually had Irish expats working the bar and the businessmen seemed to be there to have a beer with other businessmen, rather than to pick up college-aged girls.

The nicest place so far has been a place called Bar Rouge, which has a prime location downtown with a huge outside patio overlooking the river across to the upmarket Pudong region with all the lit-up skyscrapers and hotels. Inside is the bar, along with big plush lounging areas centered around tables (which must be reserved for $100 for the night). The tables outside also have to be reserved for some astronomical amount, so most of us ordinary folk ended up leaning against the railing and enjoying the view.

So, overall, I've started to do a bit less exploring in the day, and a bit more in the night. There are probably hundreds of other clubs and bars I haven't even heard of, but I'm content going to one or two a week and seeing if I stumble on anything else worthwhile. I think one month was probably a pretty good amount of time to be in Shanghai - it's a lot of fun and there's a lot to do, but I don't get an awful lot of learning done and it's hard to find people to speak to in Chinese (although my taxi and directions vocabulary is becoming spectacular). We'll see how the next two weeks go...

[View from the patio at Bar Rouge]

Up to top