I stopped at the Shanghai 7/11 convenience store for the first time today after lunch and bought this gummy candy where half the candy tasted like mango and the other half tasted like lemon cola. Unfortunately, I ate it too fast because it was so good, so I have to make sure to go back and buy some more before I leave. For dinner, I cooked up the pack of ramen noodles that I had brought from home in the small coffee mugs in the hotel. Looking back on what I did today, I feel like everything revolved around food. Oops.
Day 23: Today, like last Sunday, I visited 国际礼拜堂. However, instead of attending the Shanghai Community Fellowship (or basically the church's foreigners' service), I went to the Chinese service at 7AM, which is referred to as the Hengshan Church service. Throughout service, I was really tired and struggled to understand most of what was said. I picked up a couple of words like "Bible" and "Jesus," but that was pretty much it, but I have no regrets of attending the Chinese service. After learning in school about the incompatibility of communism and religion, it amazed me to see all of these citizens in a communist country listen to sermon, pray, and sing hymns. After church, I stopped by 7/11 again and tried to find the gummy candy that I bought yesterday. Unfortunately, the store didn't have anymore, so I had to buy different flavors (peach and green apple), which actually turned out to be even better than the flavors I bought yesterday! I spent the rest of my day sitting around in different areas of the hotel, and while I was sitting in the hallway of the 4th floor (my favorite place), this Chinese man came up to me and said something, but he was speaking too fast, so I couldn't understand him, but he gave me a whole bag of soda and left. Wow, interesting, right? This was definitely the highlight of my day. I don't really drink soda, so I passed it onto other classmates that I saw in the hotel, but getting gifts from a random person was nice!
Day 24: Today was the first day of our second class in Shanghai (Chinese for Current Events), and as a pre-health student, I felt that the topics in this class would be more relevant to me than Business Chinese, so I was excited. During class, my roommate passed out pineapple cake that she brought as gifts for us from Taiwan, and it was honestly really good - both fruity and soft. I also was a bad student today and didn't go to Martial Arts class, but on the bright side, I used the time to finish my homework for class. I made sure to stop by at my favorite place on campus, 全家, to get snacks, including my favorite Korean banana milk. I went back again at night with my roommate to buy ice cream, and we saw this weird Hello Kitty ice cream that was cookies-and-cheese flavored, which my roommate bought and said tasted okay. Maybe I'll go back and try it myself another day.
Day 25: Again, like any other Tuesday, we had class, had our first dictation quiz for this class, and had tutoring session. I stopped by at 85 Degrees Bakery again, but unfortunately, they had no more mango cream bread, so I had to settle for something else. There was this cool coffee bean and coffee cup display that I took a picture of though. I think it'd be really fun to try to make something like it at home because it's aesthetically pleasing and smells nice! I spent the rest of the night basically studying for tomorrow's dictation quiz and preparing for my class presentation (AKA 报告 / bàogào) about my diary entries in Shanghai.
Day 26: Today I had class, dictation, and Taichi class, and we were told that we would have group presentations, a test, and a dictation quiz tomorrow, so everyone was pretty stressed. I think food played a large role in keeping me sane today. I had this strawberry cream filled cracker with koala drawings on it, which has Chinese writing on the box but is actually Korean, and peach yogurt for snack today.
I also chose to go out and eat dinner at an actual restaurant today to get me ready for a long night. I never got the name of the restaurant, but it's the restaurant that's right next to the university gate near the laundry service and the fruit stands. It felt like a restaurant that a lot of locals came to, and to be honest, my friends and I didn't know how to even order because the restaurant had a cash register, buffet-looking line, and a place to pick up food, so we didn't know where to start. I ended up walking up to the only "foreigners" (AKA the students from Columbia University that were also staying at the same hotel as us) and asking them for help. It was actually quite simple. After ordering and paying for food at the cash register (in my case, I ordered spicy meat noodles (AKA 辣肉面 / là ròu miàn)), I took my receipt to a table. Then, a waitress came and took my receipt including one of the clothes pins (with the table number on it) on our table, and after a while, she came back with my food. It was pretty greasy, so I didn't drink the soup, but the noodles itself were good, so I definitely enjoyed it. After eating, we all came back to the hotel and just studied.
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