Day 27 Munchies!!

Work today was excruciating, I’ll just come right out and say it. I went through several packs of tissues over the course of the day and suffered from a little malady called lack-of-motivation. One interesting thing happened at lunch today, though. James decided not to eat with Evan and me because he never likes the food anyways so he just went straight to his American candy bar instead of wasting time at the cafeteria. Whatever, it’s his lunch. So Evan and I head down to lunch and in the elevator this random kid says, “So I heard you guys speak English,” and we told him we did and then ended up finding out that he’s another intern at China Universal working in Customer Service and then ate lunch with him. We were also joined by his fellow intern, a nice girl who is an international student at Washington University in St. Louis and had a fun lunch talking with them about some Chinese culture things and where to buy train tickets. Once you get to know them, Chinese people are very friendly and generous and everyone we’ve encountered in the office has been willing to help us with a variety of things. (However, if you don’t know them, and you’re at, say, the Expo, you might come out with a bad impression of these people).

After work, I headed over to the Jing’an area of Shanghai to meet some of the other LDS young adults in the area for dinner and just hanging out. We had a few cancellations, so it ended up being me, another guy I met on Sunday named James, a guy who works at the Expo named Micah and the organizer, Tyler. We headed to the BEST American restaurant in Shanghai: Munchies. I’m pretty sure I have never had fries or a chocolate milkshake as good as these, even in the states. And I don’t think that’s only because I’ve been starved of American food for a month now. We had a great time and definitely got out some of our pent up frustrations that come with living in China. These guys are all really interesting, too. Tyler is a professional skate boarder and the waitress at the restaurant recognized him from a recent magazine article. James offered to set me up with a VPN that he could provide from his own private server. Micah grew up in Thailand, speaks very good Chinese and yesterday translated for a star NBA player (whose name I cannot remember) when he spoke at the USA Pavilion. You meet some crazy awesome people in foreign countries, that’s for sure.

Possibly the best part of the night happened in the taxi ride back to Pudong. The subway in Shanghai closes ridiculously early (even for me, and I’m usually ready to head back pretty early) so I’ve been getting very good at hailing taxis. I’ve also gotten good at telling taxi drivers where to take me (Basically I say: “Pudong, Pucheng Lu *mumble* Shangcheng Lu” and then he’ll think for a minute and he’ll say something that sounds something like what I told him, and I say “Dui” and get in.) Well, I guess he thought I sounded really good because three minutes after I was in the car he started up some full-fledged conversation and I had to shamefully tell him, in English, “Oh sorry, I don’t actually speak Chinese.” Embarrassing, but cool that he thought I did!