Lisa in China 2018

Lisa He and her husband came to Highline when Ben was a baby. Her husband and daughter also visited.  Currently they are uber busy preparing their 15 year old daughter Faith to get into the #1 high school. They got her acceptance letter but she still needed to take a final entrance exam and all her finals for school. Pressure to do well in school is relentless here. Then they were going to take Faith to Japan — for fun, I think.

Lisa and her husband Jack drove us to Xitang. What a luxury after taking the metro and trains and walking everywhere!

Xitang is beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For our 11th anniversary on Jun 17th, we visited one of our favorite places in the French Concession. It’s on Wulumuqi Road.  We can buy videos, eat great Western food, buy good coffee, and hang out. Ben took this photo.

Later we visited the Foreign Languages Bookstore which we love. It’s off of East Nanjing Road on quieter more Chinese streets. (East Nanjing is a lot of malls.) Ben took this photo.

We ate at a restaurant we like near there with great eggplant, shrimp fried in a butter-like oil over baby scallions with tons of garlic, fried fish, and of course, green bok-choy type veggies.

Then we took the 1 hour boat cruise where you can see all the buildings lit up at night on both sides of the river.

 

 

 

One of the things you have to work with in Shanghai is the technology variables. For example, SJTU gives me a Chinese phone number and SIM card, which is great, but a) everyone here uses We Chat which b) won’t work on your phone outside your room unless you have a Chinese phone. Also c) if you did not load the We Chat app before you got here and you have Google as your app service you can’t load any apps here in China.

So I take pictures and do We Chat with my Chinese phone that I bought for about $90.  But now I have to We Chat the photos to myself while We Chat is on my computer and live so I can download them and get them onto my blog.  (Worse is trying to VPN into your computer at Highline. Type one letter, wait one minute for it to process. I am not kidding.)

So we have done lots lately. Shanghai Disneyland which I do not recommend. Long lines for a few rides that are spaced far apart.

 

 

 

 

We did go to this fabulous amusement park not far from us. $17.00 for an all-day pass. Ben went on over 25 rides. And the park is so beautiful! The only downsides are some of the staff are beyond curmudgeonly, and you can only do some things once, and some rides only go every 20 minutes. But still we did so much! We met some Chinese Americans and Ben followed them around and did all the rides with them. The boy, Isaah, is 9, so they were thick as thieves. We stayed 6 hours and ended with the Ferris Wheel.

 

Paul took the metro out to the outskirts of town, then an Uber, to go to a place where they filmed movies with old-time Shanghai buildings and streetcars.  Ben and I went to “Junketeria” which our neighbors named. It’s across from the Yuyuan Gardens shopping area and is chock full of jewelry, underwear, scrub brushes, mosquito repellant, knock-off legos, souvenirs and whatever else might want. I got some nice souvenirs.

I also got to go to Tian Zi Fang which is the cutest little shopping and eating area. They took old housing of Shukiman style and turned it into this really cute shopping area of winding alleys. See my photos!

 

Only 2 weeks left. We will meet Ding Yaping for dinner, Sunny for lunch. I will meet Dr. Ma again for lunch and try to meet Gavin, next year’s visitor, before I go. We want to see Shelley and Sophy once more. They are very busy now, as is Lisa He and her family.

Since the boys arrived and the Highline group arrived, I have been too tired and busy to post! Last night I fell asleep at 9 and got up before the boys, determined to post! (Ok, then this post got delayed because Paul’s camera got so full of data it froze. It took us days to figure out how to fix it. Being without a good working phone with We Chat and unable to download your photos or use any apps is torture in China. You have to load all the apps you need before you come here.  You can buy a Chinese phone, which I did, but many of the apps are in Chinese. Still We Chat alone is so worth it! When you go home after spending the day with someone, you send them the photos you took via We Chat and they instantly have them.

Paul took Ben to the Science and Technology Museum one Tuesday since I teach that day and am gone 7:30 to 3pm.  Ben loved it. Ben’s routine is to want to stay in our apartment where he loves his bed which is his personal piece of furniture, big enough for lego battles, reading, and watching TV. He loves to do these and play video games on my computer and be read to. Thus he complains when we want to go out. However, he generally likes or loves everything we take him to.

Paul and I would prefer to spend the day sight seeing the local streets, but Ben has a hard time with that, so we build in fun stuff. Here is the aquarium, which we all really enjoyed. It’s smaller than some, but well constructed where you walk through tunnels surrounded by huge wrap around tanks of fish, turtles, and sharks.

We got to see the sting rays and sharks being fed. The sharks were not very interested, but some of the sting rays were very friendly with the feeder.

 

We bought tickets to the Acrobat show. It’s called ERA — a journey through time or something. Supposedly it subtly tells the story of China’s last 5000 years. I didn’t really catch that, but the acrobatics were amazing. It was hard for Ben and I to stay awake until we got there at 7. The show was 7:30 to 9:15. $350 Yuan per person. We are considering going again.

I will post photos soon.

 

 

We went to People’s Park yesterday which is off of People’s Square. People’s Square is huge.  I think the park is huge but we did not see much since we found the kid’s amusement park and spent the day there. Ben did bumper cars, a small roller coaster, and then we fished for large goldfish in a shallow child’s pond. It was really hot, then it rained fairly hard and we let ourselves get wet just to cool off, then it stopped. We were there 3 1/2 hours.

 

 

 

We ate at McDonald’s since it was all we saw nearby, before we ran into this street. But my feet were already hurting so we headed home after walking down this street for a few minutes. My feet hurt every day. Paul says it is probably because everywhere here is flat and hard. Either cement or mall walking in the subway. And we walk every day. I need to find a foot massage place I like or I will not be able to see and enjoy China for the next 5 weeks.

I really like my students. They are nice and like learning and when they have to write true things they make them very entertaining.

I will have to take more photos of them. My video did not work out.

From May 15 to 19, Jeff, Wendy Lisa S, Shakira, and Elizabeth C visited Shanghai Jiao Tong University for the first annual Symposium on excellence in teaching.  Wendy and I gave four 1-hour presentations which were well received. These were on active learning strategies, using models in the classroom, formative assessment, and college English writing assignments.

 

It was enjoyable. The night before, we were taken out to dinner by Dean Hu, Dean of the School of Foreign Languages, and Assoc Dean TAO. The food at this restaurant was excellent.

Wendy and I worked together for 2 days on our presentations. The Crown Plaza Hotel is 3 blocks from my Faculty Club, so we walked to each others’ hotels. Here she is outside the Faculty Club.

 

 

The afternoon of the first presentations the Highline folks went to Yuan Gardens with me to shop for souvenirs.

 

 

Today we went to the Cloud 9 Mall: 9 stories with multiple branches. We ate at “Nice Meeting You” Hong Kong Dim Sum, then shopped at Toys R Us and Kidland to get Ben some real Legos so China stays fun.

We also got great shrimp and some noodles. Then bought some legos.

We took the train to Suzhou yesterday with Marsha and Frank, my American neighbors. Marsha said they were going and invited us along. Lots of people told us we should see the beautiful, peaceful, traditional town of Suzhou. So that sounded good. In fact, two of the gardens are UNESCO designated historical sites. We bought train tickets the day before (Marsha looked up all the details online so we did not need to use English at the ticket office.) We left at 7:30 am, took the subway to the train station, then boarded the 8:39 am train at 8:29. At 8:39 it pulls out from the station. It took 1/2 hour to get to Suzhou. We took a taxi to the first garden. Suzhou is a modern city, really. It’s only the gardens that are kept traditional. According to guide books “Suzhou is known for its handful of stunning classical Chinese gardens.”

First garden we saw:

The Garden of the Master of Nets – UNESCO

One of the four famous gardens in Suzhou, which has also won the titles of world cultural heritage site, a scenic spot of national 4A level and historical and cultural relics under state protection. The garden was built in Chunxi Year of Southern Song Dynasty (1174 A.D.) by Shi Zhengzhi after he retired from the Court. It was a private Garden with thousands of collected books, so it was also called the Hall of 10000 Volumes. The Garden of the Master of Nets standing out among the top 4 properties. It is regarded as an ideal example in all of China.

In fact, a lot of the gardens are rooms with large open-air windows where you can contemplate nature from a dry area and have tea or read or paint.

Second garden:

Lingering Garden – UNESCO

Originally it was a classic private garden and built in 1593 by XuTaishi, a bureaucrat of the Ming court, as his private residence. It is also one of the four most famous gardens in China. It is 23, 310 square meters.

Like other famous gardens in Suzhou, the Lingering Garden seeks to create stunning natural landscapes within limited space. In this garden, domiciles, ancestral temples and private gardens are included. Buildings, trees, and flowers blend harmoniously with their surroundings.

The garden can generally be divided into four parts: the central, eastern, western and northern parts according to the style of the buildings. These four parts are connected by a 700-meter (about 0.4 miles) long corridor on the wall of which calligraphy carved on the stone can be found.

This one was prettier to us, with more greenery and less rocks, but still very traditional Chinese so lots of cement and rocks and paved walks.