Today I took a morning walk in search of a park to practice my ocarina a little bit in. I had a bit of difficulty, but did find a little one several streets down off of Changzhou Lu (Lu=road). It was a beautiful day, with little smog in the blue sky and the air temperature had increased a bit.
I got a text from Chris asking if I wanted to go to People's Square and visit English Corner, and so I met him in front of work and we took an 18RMB taxi out of Jing An for Huangpu District. We got some KFC and a Pepsi and headed into the beautiful, bustling park. The last time I'd been here was with Blake at night, where we had mostly been underground, so this was the first time I got a good look at the large park. We arrived at a nice little shaded plaza, where a group of Shanghaiers were sitting around.
Upon sight of us, they got up and approached us: Chris introduced me as his coworker, and then I quickly found we had two small crowds around us. You see, English Corner is named such not because it is particularly British, but because it is a place where Shanghaiers go to practice their English with native speakers. They get authentic, free English practice, whereas the foreigners get to have a limelight in return and meet people.
And so I talked and talked and talked for several hours, and was asked where I came from by every person. Chicago was held high in esteem by several, but I couldn't talk about it much since all I've ever done is drive through it. Most of them were men about my age or much older, but a few pairs of girls stopped and chatted, and that was nice. I found the experience, although pleasant, a bit draining: the nature of the arrangement is such that the conversation tends to be a bit one-sided, with roughly a dozen people asking and expecting answers of the same foreigner. Although I mingled well, interacting with groups of people has always been a fatiguing thing for me, so Chris and I left early. I do plan to go back next Sunday: maybe I can get better at group conversationalism.
After that, Chris and I took the taxi back to Jing An, where we ran into Blake on the street: he had just gotten duplicate keys made, since Sean tends to lose his housekey. Chris and I continued on to work where we played ping pong for a while, and we practiced our games. After that, we went to our homes.
Later that evening, I remembered I needed batteries from Carrefour, and so stepped back out onto the streets. However, instead of going up Yuyao to Wuning and carrying straight past Changzhou, I decided to follow Xiening (I think that's the name) towards the river. There was a small, under-construction bridge which I went over, and quickly found myself in a network of alleys straight out of Bladerunner: clothing hung just overhead from lines, the alleys were tight, boxes and fire-barrels littered around amongst the merchants and people living their evenings. This was a place, I could tell, that saw very very few foreigners. It was pretty neat, and I bought a round of sweet bread from a man for 1rmb.
Once I had finished exploring this neat place, I walked up to Wuning Rd (once I found an exit from the warren), crossed over the bridge (I will get a picture of it at night, it is quite cool) and got batteries at Carrefour. I grabbed dinner on the way back (fried rice) and am now back at the apartment, likely to turn in early. Tomorrow I'll be looking to take a few pictures and find a good way to put them online, so expect some pictures (finally!) in some of the following posts.
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