Shanghai- Day 2

Julie,

Ok so because I can’t post on the blog, I am going to try doing the letter in word to see if I can post the pictures throughout the letter like I would on the blog.

Today was a busy and crazy day and boy are my legs tired after how much walking we did.

The morning started out with our first day of classes of Strategy and Finance. Strategy seems like it is going to be a really good class. I hope I get out of it what I think I will because I think it can be very useful with everything we are doing in practice administration. Finance will be a good overview course, but I am afraid it is probably going to be a pretty dry class based on the first day.

After classes in the morning, we got out for lunch and the culture dash. Lunch was box lunches which are usually pretty sketching by way of what we actually end up getting. Today was no different and we got some weird sandwich and some fruit and a weird pastry or two. It all ended up tasting ok, but nothing great.

After I ate my lunch in my room and checked my email, we went to the bottom floor and met as a team at 1pm to head out on our culture dash. Since Kyle is from this area, we decided the best thing to do would be to follow him around to do our video and interviews. The main thing I wanted to get accomplished though was to find the knock off market.

We started out by heading to the Shanghai historical museum that told us all about what Shanghai was, is, and is planning to be.  It was cool to see and a great place to start. I definitely am not a museum person though. I like to see what they have, but I usually don’t spend more than 2 or 3 minutes in an area before I am ready to move on.

View of the entrance area of the Museum

After the museum, Kyle took us to what is known as the Bund. It is a street of 200 year old buildings where the financial district use to be. It was a cool site to see, but we sure did A LOT of walking to get there. From our hotel we took a walking street (shopping area). I could not believe how many people there were. It is crazy to think where on earth did all these people come from and where do they sleep at night. It was fun to walk through the streets of Shanghai and observe the people. I missed that because it wasn’t something we could really do in India. After all our touring and picture taking we got down to what we really wanted to do—go see all the knock off markets.

Me on the walking street in Shanghai

The Bund

This is a shot across the river to Pudong.

By this point I was already exhausted but I was excited to see what is available. After spending an hour there I figured out two things. 1. I wasn’t ready to buy anything because 2. They have EVERYTHING there.  As part of our culture dash we decided to interview one of the ladies who ran one of the shops. She spoke pretty good English and was fun to talk to. Even after filming our interview with her, the first thing she said when we were done is “are you going to buy a tie?” Because she was such a good sport in helping us film our interview I decided to buy a couple ties right there. As we were finishing up, I started asking her some questions and come to find out her name is Julie or the name she uses for her business with Americans and she has a little boy that will be 3 years old this summer? Funny huh? Well they had all sorts of things from clothes to shoes to bags to watches to DVDs to games to whatever else you can imagine. I figured I better come back to the hotel and figure out what I really wanted so I didn’t end up buying a bunch of stuff just because it was there and available.

Notice the Disney Cars cars and the Thomas the train series. The bag is one that my teammate James got for his wife that I guess was really close to the real one

She had sent him a picture of.

Well that was it for today. After all that walking I just came back to my room and relaxed and now it is 9pm and I am fighting to stay awake.

Looking back over this post, I thought it was going to be a lot more exciting that it is, sorry.

Hopefully tomorrow will have some more exciting things going on.

Love ya so much,

Brock