Foothold

Familiar and unfamiliar. Life in Shanghai has been equal parts both, as the challenge to establish myself in a foreign country continues. For the past week, I’ve been acclimating to my new routine of working out, going to work, and finding things to help me get settled into my apartment. Real exciting stuff I know.

By and large, my time has been spent at my center, reading through training materials, observing classes, and even getting to teach a few activities, which was a nerve-wracking and fun new experience for me. I think that teaching will be the most enjoyable part of the job for me, and I look forward to actually knowing what I’m doing in that area.
Other than work, not much progress has been made in settling in. I’m still trying to clean and fix the apartment up in the few hours that I’m home, and my Mandarin studies have not made any real advancement.

One thing that I do want to talk about is a journey that I took last weekend. For the past several months, I have been trying to get back into piano, and it seemed like a damn shame if all the progress that I’ve made went to waste. So I found a listing for a small secondhand piano, out in an area called Xujingzhen. This arduous journey would take one and a half hours each way in the 100 degree heat, by metro and bus (which I had not used before). Shanghai’s public transportation system is really easy to understand, so I was able to successfully navigate myself all the way there. Thankfully, Apple Maps has the English names of places and accurate routes, so my journey wasn’t as confusing as it could’ve been. Carrying the piano back was a work out in itself, and by the time I got back home I was drenched in sweat. Nothing like knocking out your workout and errands all in one trip.

Words can’t really tell the full story (At least not words of a man on his last weekend day), so here’s a few sights from the week that I thought were interesting: