After a long flight from New York to China, I landed in Shanghai to meet my Chinese teammate Ruby. She helped me order a venti black coffee at the Starbucks in the airport and we hailed a cab! We headed to the hotel from the airport and she let me sightsee from the car. On first impression, Shanghai reminded me a lot of New York and all of the signs were lit but I couldn't read them which added to my intrigue.
We stayed in a beautiful hotel in Downtown Shanghai with a great view! I could not believe that SJTU put us in such a nice hotel!
After I got settled and took a shower, Ruby and I went to find lunch. We went in this underground tunnel and ended up at a ramen place in a mall. I still. to this day, have no idea how we got there considering we just kept making left and right turns. After our lunch, we went to a park nearby the hotel that I had been eyeing when we walked to the ramen place.
After the park, we headed back to the hotel to meet Gauhkar, my American teammate and roommate for the whole trip. We then ventured to the custom clothes fabric market, got super lost on the side of town but ended up getting clothes made! I had to come back on Thursday to pick them up. After we got back from our fabric market adventure, we met up with the other 5 people on the trip who all happened to be on the same flight.
We headed to this dumpling place. These dumplings have hot soup along with the meat filling. I got shrimp dumplings and struggled eating them with chopsticks. Hands down, they were in my top three meals that we had in Shanghai. After that great meal, we headed back to the hotel, taking lots of pictures of downtown Shanghai at night. It was so gorgeous because all of the billboards changed every minute and they had the weirdest ads!
After a long day, I took a hot bath in our super nice deep bathtub that I fit it. I'm 5'10.5" and I could sit in it and be almost completely submerged. The next day, was gonna be a busy one considering that we had to meet our professor and help practice our presentations for the SJTU showcase.