First Few Days in China

Hi everyone! We officially arrived in China around 730p 12/29 local time (remember China is currently 13 hours ahead of US EST). We made our way through immigration which was very intimidating.  Our welfare officer was there to meet us. Because we arrived later than expected we missed the bullet train. We had to take a bus to the railway in Shanghai and get on the 'slow train'. 2 hours on the slow train to then take a taxi to our hotel. We got to the hotel on Friday at 1a. We needed to be ready by 830a to get our traveler health check done. Friday was such a crazy day with the hospital check, getting phones set up, looking at apartments. Saturday we moved into our apartment. It's a really nice apartment considering what most of China has available.
It was a very stressful couple days. We will blog more about some of our experiences like the bus almost cutting Matt in half. But, just to let all our friends and family know, we are safe and still alive. We are slowly...very slowly getting introduced to the China way. And yes, it is very different than the US or shall I say Western society.

Happy New Year to everyone! May 2017 be a blessed one for us all!!

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 1, 2017 at 9:59 PM

    I'm glad you guys are getting settled! What's it like seeing everything written in Chinese and not being able to read it? Are you guys adjusting ok so far? Im happy you guys made a friend too!! Be safe!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MattJanuary 2, 2017 at 3:24 AM

      Hey Steph. It is pretty odd seeing everything written in Chinese. When trying to buy food from a shop, we honestly have no idea what we are ordering. It just looks good and we are hungry.

      In fact, when walking around with a fellow expat yesterday, he was able to translate some of the menu for us. A shop was listing a dish similar to Beef Lo Mein, and he was able to learn that the beef was simply "close to beef." So not beef at all. We didn't order anything from him and never found out what the meat really was.

      Luckily he took us to a shopping center about 30 minutes walk away from our apartment which was complete with underground Wal-Mart, Starbucks, 24/7 KFC (in fact we later saw 3 KFC's within a 5 min walk from eachother), and a Pizza Hut. But each of those places are overpriced compared to local food.

      Delete

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