[pictures coming soon]
I’m spending winter break in China to visit my relatives, who I’ve never met. The last time my parents saw them was 16 years ago! Last Saturday (12/17), we took a 13-hour flight from San Francisco to Shanghai, China.
I thought the initial experience of being in another country was interesting–everything is written in a language I can’t read or write. In addition, Shanghai had their own dialect which is unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s a shock when you can’t understand anything around you.
As a friend drove us from the Pudong International Airport to a Holiday Inn near the train station, I noticed how advanced and industrialized everything was. The highways were all perfectly lit with strings of yellow street lamps. Huge billboards hang over the road at regular intervals. On local roads, most of the traffic lights have timers counting down next to them. It’s very different from our streets, most of which are at least two or three decades old.