8/26-27/07
The 14 hour flight from San Francisco to Shanghai was surprisingly quick. All I have to say is thank god for in flight movies. We ended up watching four of them. I slept for about 30 seconds and was then woken up to be served what must have been our fifth meal. They really didn’t let us go hungry, my stomach didn’t growl once.
Finally we arrived in Shanghai, at about 5:00pm our time (2:00am Oregon time) and I was still surprisingly awake, probably from the adrenaline. There were no more caucasions ANYWHERE.
Three of our group bags are missing, which includes my duffle bag with all my clothes in it. Oh well, at least I have all my stuff. They figured the missing bags were still in San Francisco because our flight was delayed in Eugene and when we arrived in San Fran we only had about 30 minutes to get to our next flight, so the didn’t get it to our next plane in time.
We finally connected with Ying outside. It was very hot and muggy! We got on our bus that would take us around central Shanghai and then to our hotel. Shanghai is a gorgeous place at night. All the skyscrapers are lit up and tons of shops and bars are lit up all over town.
At the hotel we were catered to very well, especially at dinner, the food was awesome. I have used the phrase “sheh sheh” (“thank you”) many times. At dinner the food was all fairly “normal” Chinese food except for the whole shrimps. I mean head, eyes, legs and everything. I had one and it was fine but it’s really hard to get over the thought. It was also really crunch cause the shell is left on. After dinner I became extremely exhausted cause I had been awake for about 27 hours and it had been daylight up until the last two or three hours. We went up to our room and went to sleep. The bed is actually very hard, like a wood floor with some roll out padding on it. But it felt wonderful after the long day and I fell asleep in no time.

P.S. Not sure yet of what my first project will be on.