A bit delayed.

Although our time in Shanghai is already finished and we have happily moved on to the sights of Beijing, I feel as though I will still introduce our daily life we mostly enjoyed, but some days barely made it through, for the past seven weeks.

These first few are all of where we lived.  It was a hotel on the campus of Fudan University, where we were taking our classes.  So they do both short and long term stays. With my roommate, Jasmine, we had a room with two beds, a room with two desks and a dresser, and a bathroom. Not necessarily spacious, but definitely more than I was expecting!

While I did clean up my desk a bit, it actually was not rare for it to be that clean.

Notice by the books that I had been studying but decided taking pictures was a better option.

To this day, I am still not entirely sure with what I am cooperating. I believe something to the effect of closing the door.

The view outside our bedroom window. If you have been lucky enough to skype with me (just kidding!), I was probably sitting in those chairs just inside the other window.

One of the streets on campus. The entire campus is streets rather than walkways because the campus is so incredibly large and a bike or moped is basically a necessity for every student.

This is 光华楼, Guanghua Lou, the building where we had class every day. Four hours. Every day. The weekdays definitely got to be long. We had class in the left tower on the tenth floor.  They’re the tallest buildings on campus and actually make a pretty decent dent on the skyline of the area.

These are our two lovely teachers. On the left is 邢老师, she taught us for the first two hours of class directly from our textbook vocabulary lists, grammar points, and dialogues. Quizzes every day, lots of questions about the textbook story characters, lots of explaining grammar, not always lots of fun.  On the right is 吴老师, she taught us for the second two hours of class for conversational practice. Lots of making up pointless sentences using specific grammar, lots of repeating unknown words, once again, not always lots of fun. But they were both incredible sweethearts with lots and lots of patience. They were both convinced they looked terrible in this photo.

This is Coco, the best drink place ever.  Once we discovered that their menu was in English, we were there at least once per day, most times twice, enough for me to fill up two buy-ten-get-one-free cards. All of their drinks - different types of tea, smoothies, chocolate-type, etc., with pearls or other jellies added - are 5 to 12 元, or about $1 to $2. Fantastic. The workers at the one nearest to campus definitely recognized us on sight in not too much time at all.

This is 85° Bakery, another usual stop for us. They have breads of all kinds, breakfast-lunch, sweet-salty, big-small, fancy-simple. All fresh & delicious. 

Hope you just completely enjoyed the delayed intro to our daily Shanghai life!