The distance between Kobe Japan and Shanghai China was only two days! What were we going to do? Classes are turning into a joke as every few days we are getting off the ship into new countries. As we entered into Shanghai, the Skyline was quite astounding. Interestingly we navigated through the rivers of shanghai in roughly 4 hours before we reached the port right in front of pearl tower. Unfortunately, shanghai only lasted about 10 hours before we left! I had a field lab all day for my energy for the world class, the lab was amazing but I would have loved to go into shanghai and seen a few things! Oh well, just another excuse to come back! We got amazing jumping photos in front of the pear tower so I think I accomplished enough in the time I was there!
We went to the University of Shanghai, pretty much the MIT of the west, and we learned about power generation technologies in china. Most of china is powered by wind and water. Although china put’s out most of the pollution in the world, they also have the biggest population as well. After our lecture we went around to a few museums! The C.Y. Tung museum was quite interesting due to ISE (institute for shipboard education) originating from the man himself. He was a sea merchant who had donated a ship to start the Semester at Sea Program. Now it’s been 50 years since the program had started and SAS is on their 6th ship, the most advanced and fastest ship in the world. Due to the ship carrying mostly students and faculty and also circumnavigates the world, it was designed to out run almost anything. The MV Explorer is fast enough to get away from pirates and other things in the middle of the ocean but lets not think about that since this ship also doesn’t have any weapons other than water cannons.
The rest of the day we went to a rocket museum, walked around a little and made our way back to the ship to prepare to leave for Beijing! As we got back to the ship, Matt (one of my roommate’s) and I had packed our bags and gotten ready to leave. Matt is quite the talker so leaving on time didn’t happen, we also tired to find a train that would take us to the airport but no one spoke English to give us directions! After a good half hour looking for the metro and ATM we finally decided to take a cab and head on to the airport. Now this is where everything get’s hairy! We were the first ones to arrive at the airport and soon after Lisa and Phil showed their lovely faces as well. We ate dinner and slowly started to make our way to the gate but we got side tracked by a candy stand in the middle of the airport! Lisa and I got ripped off on gummy bears and ended up paying roughly 18 dollars for a 1-pound bag! Lisa and Phil had decided to go to the gate and get ready for boarding while Matt and I decided we weren’t quite ready to go over there. Matt and I only had one thing on our mind and that was SHOTS! We made our way into what was called a teahouse but instead of tea, it housed tons of alcohol. We sat down and ordered 3 shots each, 1 Chivas regal, and 2 Johnny walker red label! Alcohol was cheaper than the gummy bears, it was a joke! It took nearly 20 or so minutes to get our drinks and after we had drank them we realized the waitress had messed up our bill, she added two more shots to our bill so it only made sense to have her bring two more shots! I looked at my watch and saw we only had 6 minutes to get on the plane!
We dropped the cash and started to run! America is being put to shame as we sprint through airports, train stations and ferries! We hop on a rolling escalator to get to the gate quicker and BAM! Two guys are yelling at us screaming “Beijing”!!! We just watched them as we strolled along the escalator heading to the gate. As we jumped off we turned around and these guys were running towards us! We stopped to wait for them and as they approached us out of breath they told us our gate door had closed and we had missed our flight! Matt and I just glared at each other and grinned! We started making excuses to the gentleman saying that our cab had gotten lost and he started taking us to the wrong airport. Our poor excuses worked fortunately and we had gotten on the next flight to Beijing! We were traveling with 7 other people and they must have been wondering what was going on and why we hadn’t gotten on the plane. I know Lisa and Phil knew what happened and must of told everyone what we had been up to!
Matt and I had walked around for a while and finally decided to park it right next to our gate, we got on the Internet and there it was…the great super firewall of china! No Facebook, half of Google was blocked, and Wikipedia was somewhat non-existent. We found out the equivalent of Facebook, which is called renren and decided we would make a page and just mess around. Little did we know that renren does an extensive background check as to where you went to school , what your friends names are and whether your name is real or not. Mattelrajish was obviously not a real name and the system shut us down! As we boarded our flight matt and I had decided we would record our take off and landing with his GoPro camera! We had adhesive strips so we stuck the camera above the window and as it hung there matt tried to cover it up using his hoodie. There was a little Asian man staring at us at our 11 o clock and what must have been running through his mind is unknown, but what else would an Asian man think when there is a brown man with a beard and a white kid sticking a device to a window on an airplane? And yes we were quite the obnoxious kids on the plane, making jokes and being loud!
As we landed, we had no gangway, we took the stairs down, and you can smell the pollution in the air. Had we arrived in Beijing 2 day’s prior, visibility was down to three feet at sea level. We worked our way into a transport bus that was over crowded, people were grabbing my ass and other places which was very uncomfortable. As we got off the bus we made our way into the terminal and there was our tour guide holding up a sign that said “Raj Patel” we waved and smiled, as we introduced our selves we found out that our friends stayed at the airport instead of going to the hostel. I had emailed Flora (tour guide) that we had missed our flight so she insisted on waiting on matt and I, the rest of the night no one really spoke to us haha I wonder why.
The next morning we all got up, some of us ate breakfast and soon after we met with Flora and began our day. It started out with going to see the Forbidden City and man was it cold! As we got closer and closer, you could see the life-sized portrait of Mao (Chinese figure head) (total communist). Street vendors started to approach us with post cards, communist hats, and fake north face gloves. Of course me being me, I bought a panda hat instead of gloves…sacrificed warmth for a panda hat, total fail! As we made our way into the city, we found out it was closed due to weather so we did the next best thing, LUNCH! We feasted, tons of food and it was all sooo good. I don’t really remember everything we had but what ever it was it totally hit the spot! Right after lunch we all went to go see panda’s (in flora’s case it was pander’s since she couldn’t pronounce a’s, therefore Kayla was known as kayler, coca cola was coca coler etc). These panda’s we saw were quite amusing, one of them was just chilling, eating his/her bamboo and then all of a sudden passed out cold! About 2-3 minutes later it wakes back up and then decided to climb a tree where it picks out a spot to take an epic shit from above! Right after that he/she climbs down and rubs it’s but against the tree multiple times and then runs away. We were all-speechless, I was just clicking away on my camera getting some candid shots of this amazing animal, we all had a good laugh and continued on to the summer palace.
The summer palace its definitely a tourist destination if anyone ever decides to go to china! My goal was to get some sick jumping pictures from every port on our itinerary, so right as we start jumping, tons of Chinese photographers turned into paparazzi and started to take pictures with us, some of them even joined in. My one idea turned into a nightmare, I couldn’t even get a decent picture! Time to fast forward a little, if I cover everything I won’t have stories to tell when I get back home!
I got my jumping picture on the great wall, I didn’t get to toboggan down because of snow, we saw the bird’s nest and the water cube and all in all Beijing was a success without any flaws or regrets! We went to an acrobat show that was absolutely amazing, we saw people move in ways people should not be moving!
Now our trip to Hong Kong was absolutely horrendous. It started out being delayed almost two hours with Air China taxiing to the runway. As we took off the food onboard was disgusting, tasted like cardboard. They had some sort of desert type of Jell-O with ham in the middle, made me gag a little! We had landed around mid night and Phil, Matt and I had decided we would slum it at the sketchiest hostel in Hong Kong, we didn’t know where it was or what it was called but we just decided to wing it. As we took the train from the airport into Kowloon, we had realized that the train actually cost money and wasn’t free at all. It cost us7 dollars for a 15 minutes ride…it was a joke! We were pulling money out of an ATM and a woman approached us. Right as I saw her I thought she was literally cracked out of her mind. She didn’t know any English and she had lost her credit card, passport and had no money at all. Phil came over and I had told him that this girl was on crack, Phil bends over and looks under her nose and says “hey, did you know she has cocaine on her nose”. It was a bad time to laugh, but yes it did happen. Matt in the mean time was in the bathroom, he came running back and right as we told him he started laughing as if this were all a joke, unfortunately it wasn’t. We tried to help this girl but all she said was she had no card, and then she asked us if we had it. That’s when we got the queue to leave! What a great start to our evening? We planned on slumming it and so far it was a success!
We found a cab outside of the station and told him we needed to get to the Kung Ching Mansion. He said “are you sure”. Like that wasn’t enough for us to back out, but no, we had that “we are men” mentality and decided to go! As we got their an Indian man approached us asking if we needed a place to stay, we didn’t even make it out of the cab and Matt said “uhhhh YEAHHHHHH!” At least another 15-20 Indian males were staring us down on our way into this super sketch hostel. Apparently matt had gotten us acquainted with “sunny” the hotel manager or what ever you would call him and now we were down to first names like we were all best friends. We walked into what is supposed to be a 3-man elevator with 6 people; it was Matt, Phil and I with 3 Indians cramped up inside of this death trap. The hostel was on the 16th floor of a hi-rise as if that wasn’t bad enough.
Here was are in this elevator, matt is giving sunny our information thinking he was diffusing the situation while Phil and I were contemplating on what we needed to do in order for us to get out alive. A bigger guy was standing behind me, I had my back pack on so I didn’t know what was going on back there but I had a thought “ well there goes my kidney’s…Hong Kong black market will definitely love these!” We made it to the 16th floor alive and sunny showed us our room, which was absolutely filthy! Matt had a pillow on his bed that someone recently puked on and Phil and I decided we would share the other bed. There was one sheet covering the mattress, it was moist so we ripped it off along with the pillows and then we just started talking about how shady everything so far had been. Phil was having thoughts about taking sonny’s neck and driving it into the elevator doors had he moved an inch, and I was just thinking about elbowing sunny while turning around and throwing a jab to his adam’s apple. The door was an entire piece of steel with no peephole and the only way out was the way we came in or the window 16 floors up, with no fire escape. We slept for roughly 5ish hours and high tailed it out of there, didn’t even say good-bye! We went back to the ship, took showers and started out for Hong Kong.
This was the longest blog post yet and I am getting very tired of typing, just look at my pictures and I’m sure you’ll find the word’s yourself J.
Next post is Vietnam and Cambodia!!
-Raj Patel
