We got up early in the morning on our seventh day in China because we were scheduled to fly to Shanghai. The airport of Beijing is, thanks to the 2008 Olympics, very big but nonetheless seems to work reasonably well. However, the security checks even on a domestic flight like ours are very harsh. One of my friends had to open his suitcase in order for the officers to check some of the medications he was transporting, and when I came to the security check carrying my backpack which was packed with quite a lot of electronics and camera equipment, they simply ordered me to empty all of it out – including books, ear pods etc. Well, to be fair, I was allowed to leave one SD card in the backpack. Even in the part of the airport used for domestic flights, there are quite a number of duty-free shops, and the products seemed to be more or less reasonably priced.
On the flight the strict no-mobile-phone-even-on-flight-mode policy that we had already experienced on the flight here was enforced once more.
In Shanghai we were picked up by a bus rented by the Yan’an school, where our exchange students study. I slept most of the bus ride, plus I had a very bad seat so I wasn’t really able to take many photos. But the first impression was that Shanghai looked even bigger, or maybe just denser, than Beijing. The highway we took had, at least for some time, more than six lanes in each direction – and nonetheless it was crowded.
We arrived at the school at around 3pm, and were immediately surrounded by a crowd of students – like we had experienced in Beijing, foreigners are seemingly not a frequent sight to most Chinese people (even though I saw much more foreigners in Shanghai, also thanks to its international position as a city of business, especially banking) and especially not students of roughly their own age coming to their school. Our Chinese teacher told us that to them, westerners look “very handsome”.
We then met our exchange students, who guided us through the mass of people and brought us home. I was lucky, because my apartment in Shanghai was just across the street – which had eight lanes and the highway on a bridge above it, so you had to go to the next intersection where there was a bridge for pedestrians. Even though there was a hell lot of traffic in Shanghai, the air was much cleaner (even though it was still “health damaging” according to the Chinese air quality network) and we all walked around without masks. It is basically impossible not to live in a very tall building in Shanghai, and so did I – but we “only” lived a third of the way up. In the apartment, my exchange student handed me over to his mother, because he himself had to go back to school for extra classes until five in the afternoon. I was treated to a very warm welcome, later also from my exchange student’s father, and then we had a great dinner with various different Chinese dishes – and had a good laugh while I was trying to improve my chopstick skills and vowed to eat everything with chopsticks, not with “western food utensils”.
However I also got to know a Chinese custom I don’t like very much – the room temperature is kept at 14°C. If you compare that to the 25°C I usually have at home there is quite a difference. I spent most of my evening shivering in my room, saving my photos to my laptop, writing emails and then going to sleep early to escape the cold. The bed was a “typical Chinese bed”, meaning that it was little more than a box of wood with a blanket over it – some of my friends had problems with that, I personally didn’t, as I find hard beds quite comfortable actually. I got into bed, tucked all my clothes in, curled up into a ball and hid under the blanket in an effort to preserve at least some of my body heat. I was able to fall asleep soon, and in the morning I had a nice and warm (but smelly) air pocket under my blanket. What I also realized was that the windows aren’t tight in the apartment – but that doesn’t really matter, because the room temperature matches that outside anyway.
On the first full day in Shanghai we started off by going to school with our exchange students for the first half of the day. People say that discipline is much higher in Asian schools, but I couldn’t really confirm that in class – just like in my school, the students were better behaved in some classes and not so much in others. There were, however, some differences to our school (not only the language in which the students are taught, which is obviously Chinese). Students had to arrive 20 minutes before school officially starts in order to hand in homework assignments to their homeroom teacher, recite poems and get information about whatever was planned for the day. And the classes were bigger, with 30 to 40 students per class, in classrooms about the same size as our – we have around 18 students in each class back home. In homeroom in the morning, the students have to stand up to greet the teacher when she or he enters the classroom, and may only sit down if she tells them to. And then there’s the morning gymnastics, which takes place after the first double period and the morning break. It begins with the entire school’s classes lining up on the playground / sport field and raising the flag to the Chinese national anthem. While all the Chinese students were supposed to salute the flag, we were asked not to. After that, the school dances to a song which, they repeatedly and proudly told us, “was written for our school”. And then the classes jog in lines across the sports field before leaving for their next classes one by one.
After half the school day and in-class lunch (which tasted very bad, not just to me, but to most of the students) where I limited myself to eating the rice, we were taken to a “free time center”. It is basically a community center, which was built by the Chinese Communist Party. The leader of the center was supposed to give us a tour. The inside of the building was, not surprisingly, quite red, and there were many propaganda posters. It is interesting to note that the propaganda in Shanghai is actually quite different from that in Beijing. While there are still a few “classical” posters showing soldiers on a red background and praising the “socialism of China”, most of the posters are actually on a blue background and call the citizens to “help build new homes”, “raise the standard of living” or “each firework less is one more clean breath of air”. Many of the posters also feature elements like white peace doves or green plants. But back to the community center. After a half-hour tour through the photo gallery of the community center, which was accompanied by long explanations of which important people had visited it and why, we were taken to a few elderly ladies, who offered a course in some simple Chinese crafts.Optionally we were allowed to play table tennis, and some of the Chinese people wanted to play against us. Later, many of us were dressed up in traditional Chinese costumes before being invited to watch very skillful elderly Chinese men paint and do calligraphy. We were allowed to take some of their works home – definitely not pre-planned by the leader of the community center, who gave us the tour. And at the end we tried to dance with drums under the instruction of some local people.
Back home the mother of my exchange student had decided to make dumplings with me today – which we enjoyed a lot, because, she told me, I had a very “unique style of making dumplings”.
