“Hello World!”
It’s been a week in China and honestly it feels like we’ve been around for a lot longer than that HAHAHA This week was mostly just us exploring the school campus and Shanghai (which was nothing less than amazing to be honest) because we flew in one week late. The purpose of this blog (besides being a mandatory one) is also for me to document what we do here in China so do expect a lot of photos and ramblings (or really just follow me on instagram @kenjiling if you haven’t HAHAHAHA)
Flight to Hangzhou
I packed my luggage like right before the flight and everything was a mad rush HAHA but at least I made it to the airport on time (although I was almost late getting boarding the plane because Dan asked me to get coffee). My brother and I aren’t exactly what you’ll call close-knitted but seeing him there to send me off was really heart-warming. We see each other on a monthly basis and I guess being away from Singapore for 3 months was a lot different I guess. No tears from me here because I was generally more excited for what was to come. I mean we’ve all served NS and being away from home isn’t really that new and my parents were probably getting used to it. Having said that, 3 months is really long and I hope the home-sickness comes a bit later.
Getting used to Hangzhou
Two words to describe Hangzhou – mosquitoes and hot.
- The mosquitoes here were really annoying. Like I stay on the first floor of the hostel and we get plenty of mosquitoes around and no matter how much we swat them (I have clocked at least 20 kills in the past week) THEY JUST KEEP COMING. So Dan has resorted to buying a mosquito net which we sleep in now (I once had two mosquito bites on my face when I was sleeping and it swelled man no joke) and some mosquito swatter thing which is sitting somewhere in the room waiting to be opened.
- You though Singapore was hot – welcome to Hangzhou in the sweltering summer heat. Dan told us that we missed the cold spell and the temperature just kept rising as we stayed here. So far the record here was 39 degrees (I’m not exaggerating here) and this is just going to keep increasing so good luck to u.
Honestly besides this two problems Hangzhou is really great but I’ll leave that to next time. It’s very chill here and food is pretty cheap. I just can’t get used to how excessively oily the food is here.
Shanghai
This was the highlight of the week – we went to Shanghai over the weekend for 3 days and it was really fun. The weather turned while we were there and it became really cold (I’m not complaining though – I wish the weather here could be like this most of the time), like lower than 25 degrees kind of cold. Most of our food there was xiaolongbao and it was a really authentic experience. I went to Shanghai during primary school and in 10 years, Shanghai really became quite different. Either that or my memory of Shanghai was really foggy HAHA The only disappointing part of Shanghai was Dan losing my airpods – if you see this Dan just remember that I’m gonna be throwing shade at you for the next 3 months.
We visited the bund which was the coastal area in Shanghai. I didn’t manage to get nice photos of 东方明珠 because it was foggy but the area looked really good because of the lighting (the huge number of tourists spoiled the experience though) and we managed to take some nice photos of the right side of the river which had buildings of European architectural style.
The highlight of Shanghai was Disneyland, which although had tickets priced too high, was really quite amazing. Disneyland never fails to bring out the kid inside of us and the fireworks at the end really made the ticket price worth it (did it really AHAHAHA).
I guess that’s pretty much the week here. All is well and I hope that the next few months here can be equally meaningful. The theme that I’m in has quite a demanding final project and I really hope I can deliver it after the disappointment a few days ago i.e I hate my GPA take my life. Am really honestly looking forward to more lessons (hopefully in English) and learn as much as I can here. Till then, bye!
