My first morning in this new place found me waking up to a vacant apartment. My friend was out for the night and would be returning in the afternoon. The fridge was empty and so was my stomach and it demanded a remedy fast. My journey took me wondering through several large shopping centers, eventually finding a suitable location for breakfast. I apologize in advance but my first breakfast ended up being a coffee from Starbucks and a glorified ham and cheese sandwich. Progress is steady but slow and I aim to move beyond my western comforts to more interesting selections.
My pocket contained a list of items that needed to be purchased, so with a full belly I set off in search of locating each of these items. As I wondered into an electronics superstore, think Best Buy(by the way they’ve completely pulled out of China since they are unable to compete with the place I walked into) but five times larger and with lots of little shops instead of a giant store, I started to realize how materialistic the people of Shanghai are. In America you’d walk into a Best Buy and see maybe fifteen different laptops to look at. Here, there were easily five hundred laptops on this one floor. Unable to locate anything on my list I moved to the next floor where I was able to cross two items off my list, recharable batteries and a computer mouse. With the purchase of these items came a valuable lesson, unless you want to be broke long before you expect to be, you’ve got to learn to haggle. I easily spent twice what I could have gotten for these items but I didn’t know.
I had left a note saying I would return to the apartment to meet up with my friend so with two items off my list I headed home to meet up with him. We spent the next few hours touring his neighborhood. This ended up with a cheap and awesome massage and another new and interesting meal Shanghai has to offer. Dinner was cheese and beef noodles as well as dumplings. A quick note while we’re on the subject of dumplings, several years ago while traveling in China I got my first taste of real dumplings and they were amazing. We’d go about our day, stay out until about 5am and then wake up to Coke and dumplings. Upon returning to the United States I had no desire to corrupt myself and avoided dumplings ever since. The moment the dumplings were set before, I knew it was time well spent waiting.
After dinner we set off in search of a cell phone for me to use. Another glimpse into the materialistic society came during the search for a cell phone. There was an entire floor, which was huge, dedicated to nothing but cell phones in all varieties. With the help of my friend, I managed to wade through the sea of phones and locate one, probably designed around the year 2000, to use for the next six months. You could call, you could text, and that was it. Sadly the next step up was $200 and not justifiable at all so I went with the $50 time capsule of a phone. With jet lag poking in to say hello, we decided it was best to retire for the night.
Lesson Learned: What's the point of flying half way across the world to get Starbucks? Explore, try something new, and save the Starbucks for when you're two months in and feeling home sick. Five dollars for breakfast is a joke and you deserve to be laughed at when you can walk around the corner, find an interesting and tasty breakfast food, and pay twenty cents for it.
