Better say something about the packing experience though, otherwise it would just be ridiculous, am I right? Ok so, packing was interesting, I felt as though I was going to open my own chemist here cause of all the "just in case" medicine I bought. Haha. But most of the other packing involved me saying "I'll just buy it in China, its probably cheaper there anyway." And let me tell you, it pretty much is.
Especially food! I can feed myself the three meals of the day for under $10AUD. And its a good feed, It'll be tasty and I'll full by the end of it. Mmmmmmmm. Ok, stop thinking about food.
Then, of course, after the packing, we had lift off!
Hmmm, I guess now I'll just talk about the most interesting interaction I've had with the local Shanghainese people since I've been here:
We were taking a stroll through RT mart (basically like Kmart but with groceries too!). As I perused the bath towels I caught three ladies looking and pointing at me from the corner of my eye. I glanced over at them, and saw them wearing hijabs (Muslim veils) on their heads and talking to each other about me; I gathered this with my great ability to understand body language, not quite there with the Mandarin.
I waved at them, and said "Ni hao," followed quickly with an "Asalamualaykum." They approached me, with big smiles on their faces. Wide-eyed and speaking fast they asked "Are you Muslim" in Chinese. I am sure they were already certain that I was, as I too was wearing the hijab and greeted them as any Muslim would. I replied with a confident "yes." We struck up a conversation, I contributed as much as I could with my minimal Chinese and nodded for the rest of the time. I explained to them that I was an international student from Australia and was very pleased to meet them as they were the first Muslim women I had seen. They were elated! And I realised that somewhere in the middle of the conversation, one of the ladies took my hand and held on to it for the rest of our encounter.
While I found it quite odd that a stranger grabbed my hand and held it, I felt "ok" with it at the same time, (because she didn't seem like a crazy person) and it had been a week into my time in Shanghai, and most of the local Chinese people just stared at me, literally until I was out of their line of vision;
Oh man, so much staring, I'll save that for another post, too funny. I'll leave you with a picture I took on my first night in Shanghai, in front of Shanghai University. Keep it real. :)
