Second Day of Classes in Shanghai

大家好！

Today was our second day of classes and our 3rd day in Shanghai, if you include the day we landed. Class started and we began our studies. I was put into Chinese 3 by luck, and as there are different levels of Chinese class, the material is different. We started off by listening to 童话 (tóng huà), which translates to Fairytale by Guang Liang (Micheal Wong). She even gave us the lyrics and its English translation for us to sing. It's nice though because it can also help us learn some new words and phrases. We then got on with learning about introducing our city, using Shanghai as an example. Le learned about location and population, economy, language, weather, and their delicacy. We then moved on to do our Into the Community portion of the day, which involved going to the schools canteen and interviewed a person there about the city of Shanghai. Good thing we were in the canteen for the interview, because we got lunch right after we were done!

After lunch we went to the CIEE Office area and learned about some very nice handicraft of China. One is was paper cutting,剪纸 (jiǎn zhǐ), while the other one was bracelet making, 手镯制作 (shǒuzhuó zhìzuò).  Paper cutting came to be when a man in the Ming Dynasty wrote the Chinese character 福(fú), which meant lucky, and his wife cut out the character with some designs in it. We made our own cut out of the character 囍 (xǐ), which meant double happiness. It's often hung on windows and/or doors of newly-weds.

For the bracelet portion, I would give some information but I completely forgot about it. I don't really remember what they told us about it, whoops. For cases like this, I would usually look it up, but I couldn't really find any information that really stood out. Either way, we ended up making a bracelets.

Now that our school day was finally over, we were allowed to go home. That's what me and my roommate, Jillian, did. Because we lived really close to Ellen and Lillian, our classmates, and our host parents new each other, we offered them a ride home too. Our host mom wanted to take me and Jillian out to explore with our little host sister, so we took the train from Zhongshan Park to Lujiazui and explored there at night. It was really pretty as we got to see many tall buildings, including the Pearl Tower. We also got to see the view of the Huangpu River at night with all of the lights. It was a really beautiful place to be at. After exploring, we went home to end the day.

-Amelia Lim