Shanghai Finance University and Min Yao Lu

Finally back to Min Yao Lu and see how it looks! This is where it all began. I came here in 2007 September with Niko to study for 1 semester about 5 months. The name of the University was Shanghai Finance University where we had 6 different courses. The quality of the teaching methods were...hmm questionable. In some of the classes the teacher came in with a book, started reading and was finished after 1h. Nobody said anything in the class and it was probably the worst waste of time in school sitting in those classes. If I want to read a book then I'll do it home. Another thing about the exams in the school...All the students cheated in the exams, they had the book in their lap and the teachers didn't say anything. In China the schools want to keep a high rate of graduated student with high score so that the school can look good. So the teachers don't really care if they cheat because if they fail it would be their fault and here it would mean to "lose face" if most of the class fails your test. However, everyone was super nice to us and we had a great time while being here!

学校的体育馆 - Our stadium

We lived next to the school on a road called MIN YAO ROAD, a lot of memories from here. It looks the same apart from some new apartment buildings. The area is located abour 45 mins with bus from downtown and when coming here it's a step close to the "real" China, not the super developed downtown with over 50 story buildings.

5th row is our flat

Min Yao's daily market

The houses behind ours were not very...high tech

This was my first time I came to Asia and everything was so new and foreign for me. The food was strange and I didn't even know how to use chopsticks in the restaurants. I remember some of the waitresses came and tried to teach my how to eat the rice...Nor were we able to even order a Coca-Cola in the restaurants the first weeks. We took a picture with our phone which we then showed to the waiter to get a Coke...The whole language at that time seemed almost impossible to learn and nobody seemed to understand what we wanted. Even though we had the address the taxi driver still didn't understand what we said because of the wrong tone (chinese has 4 tones)

But although the cultural clash and everything being different I felt more home than back in Finland for some reason. Like in the eye of the storm. That's 3,5 years ago, so many things have happened since. If someone at that time would have told me that I will be living and working in Shanghai a few years later speaking rather fluent Chinese I'm not so sure I would have believed that. But here I am, time goes super fast, there are new things happening everyday.

Shanghai is the city of convenience, on Sunday I didn't even get up from bed. When getting hungry took my laptop, went to www.sherpa.com and ordered food online. 30 minuted later the Kebab roll arrived for 4 Euros and I can continue to play Dead Space 2 for another 10 hours.