Happy Moon Day!

Thursday, September 20th 2007



Yes, yes, I know I’m a few days late, but it’s better to say it now than never! Happy Moon Day! Moon day was Tuesday but let me start with Sunday.

On Sunday, since I am considered a scholarship student, but I’m not here on a scholarship, I’m an exchange student, I went on the scholarship trip provided by Fudan. We left around 1pm for the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum . This museum is very well known for their under ground shopping center where bargaining is your job. It’s a workout. When we went to the museum, we toured inside and also saw an IMAX film, “Walking on the Moon.” It was my first IMAX movie, but I was kind of tired:/ Some of my favorite things in the museum are displayed in the following pictures:)

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Here are some human sized bugs!

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Something for you smarties!

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My favorite picture of all! The piano robot! It played the songs automatically on the piano, my dream bot.

After the museum, we went to Binjiang Avenue for dinner and some shopping. That’s basically where we went to the Super Brand Mall and ate dinner and some shopping. The mall is about 10 stories high or so, probably a little less. But it has an ice rink at the top along with a movie theater! Pretty sweet I’d say. After that, we got to go up the Oriental Pearl Tower! Isn’t that amazing? The site was pretty nice, kind of like if you were on top of twin towers or the empire state building. Here are some views.

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After the Pearl Tower, we headed back to campus and returned around 9pm. It was quite a long day.

Tuesday was Moon Day, also known as mid-autumn festival. To read up more on the holiday, go to http://www.chinavoc.com/festivals/Midautumn.htm.

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The moon!

It was a long day of classes and working on projects for me. Fudan did throw a party for the festival on campus, but I had class during that time so I was unable to attend. But after class, which ended a little after 8pm, a bunch of us went out to dinner and then to a house party where we hung out and ate lots of moon cake, the best part! Haagen-Dazs was also very busy around this holiday. Haagen-Dazs is considered a luxury here in China, very expensive. They actually made a cake in the form of a moon cake that was extremely expensive, not sure how much, but there was also a very long line for this event. The night was very relaxing and fun. It was great to be spending time with friends for the night.

Besides the scholarship and Moon Day, what else interesting has happened? I got into my second bike accident, not something I’m proud of. It was a hard core run in, but I’ve survived. I had also spoken to one of my friends that had witnessed a car/motorcycle accident. Apparently a bike was trying to pass a car on the left side but didn’t realize the on coming traffic and was ran over by the on coming car. He said he helped pull the victim out from under the car…I don’t think his legs are looking too good.

Yesterday was the first time I played rugby. There was a bunch of us that played with the Australians. They were pretty hard core. It took me a little while to learn the game, but it’s actually pretty fun. I need to get in better shape. But it was a great experience and I hope to play again. Have I also mentioned that I plan on running in the 4.5k race in Shanghai during their marathon and half marathon? I’ve recruited some guys to run as well, but I’m still looking for some girls.

Tomorrow we leave for our vacation for National Week. There’s a bunch of us going to Guilian, but actually, there’s about 11 people going on a tour group then coming back to Shanghai then going to other places. I’m going with 3 other people and we’re going to go down to Guilian for a few nights and then going to Yangshuo for a few more. Hopefully the trip will take about 7 days. We’re just going on our own but we do have things that we want to do in mind. We will be flying out at 5:30pm tomorrow afternoon and arriving in Guilian around 7:30pm. The tour group people are flying out at noon, so we might try to meet them for dinner, we’ll see. We plan to go on the boat tour (of course!), rock climbing, biking, hiking, hot air balloon, bamboo boat tour, ect. It should be great! There’s a lot of people going all over including Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, Beijing, ect. I can’t wait to hear about everyone’s experiences when we get back! I wish I could go to all those places as well, maybe one day. So have a great week everyone and I’ll blog when I return from National Week!