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| Jason Jewell Class of 2017 |
Shanghai is a city that will quickly remind you of New York City, except it seems as if the city never ends. We traveled from our hotel at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to Shanghai Maritime University - a two-hour drive to what one could easily mistake as the Everglades of Florida. The diversity of landscape and scenery in just the small part of China that we have seen is amazing. Everything has been laid out so methodically, and is always well maintained. Even the flowers along the main road were watered; an advantage to communist government is having a 14-person crew to water flowers and clean vases.
The food is very different as to be expected, however it is not as bad as one might expect. At home I am known as a picky eater, while here I have eaten just about everything I have come across. My motto is “Don’t ask, just eat." The less I know about what it is, the better off we are. I even ventured out and tried street food, which resembled some type of rodent, but I didn’t ask, I just ate. Whatever it was that I had didn’t kill me, make me want to throw up or even make me sick - which is generally my baseline for satisfactory food while in China.
When going to eat, we all eat together as a family, sharing all the dishes and receiving one bill for the group, which is something a group of foreigners isn’t quite accustomed too. Our first night, we went out and ordered a dish for each of us, a decision that landed us with much more food than any of us could handle. Surprisingly we ended with a bill of about $20 for five of us at a restaurant one might compare to Applebee’s. We are still learning to eat as a family, and we seem to have the arguing like a family down pat, but we are all nonetheless loving our time in China.
Jason Jewell is a senior McConnell Scholar studying political science at the University of Louisville.