I think it’s fair to say that at this point quite a lot has been said about our weekend trip to Shanghai. I’m not going to spend this whole post talking about it, but I have to talk about it a little bit. I mean, I’m not going to go to Shanghai (!) and not mention it even a little in my blog. That would just seem so wrong.
The first thing we noticed upon our arrival in Shanghai was just how crowded the subway actually was. You hear about how crazy it can get, but you don’t expect it to be as crowded as it actually is. Honestly, it’s insane! You have to push to get off the train in time, and I mean aggressive pushing here. No time for good manners. So after a while of struggling on the subway and getting lost, we gave up and cabbed it to our hotel, which was pretty much perfectly located. The Shanghai Marvel is a ten-minute walk away from nearly everything we went to that weekend, with the exception of the Pearl Tower. Oh, and there’s a Starbucks right next door, that I went to far, far too often. It was awesome.
So that’s enough about Shanghai for now, I’m sure everything else has been covered in detail by the rest of the group. Onto my first week with a new host family! The first thing I want to say is that both of my host families are incredible. And I don’t think I can convey just how good the food is here, this morning I had these steamed buns with pumpkin filling inside, I think I died and went to heaven, it was fantastic. I’m much closer to the school than I was with Willow’s family, so if the weather is nice, we usually walk home after school, and take the bus a few stops on the way in the morning. It’s about a twenty-minute walk, and Lei and I usually spend it talking about BBC’s Sherlock, which it seems like everyone here watches.
Things are pretty much the same in school this week, except that this week during woodshop we made wooden rings! Last week we made phone stands, which we took back to 209 during the week to finish sanding to perfection, and stained during the most recent lesson while we were waiting. We made the rings this week by first starting with a block of nice wood (I can’t remember what it was, exactly, except that it was nice and still smells good), and a plastic thing for measuring ring sizes. We got our sizes, and the teacher carved out holes into the block, about two inches apart, and then sawed the block into five parts so we all had our own squares with a ring-sized hole in the center. From there, we went to the power sander, and we began to shape our rings. I got about halfway through when I remembered the perfectly circular wooden rings the teacher had shown us earlier, and I asked him how I could make mine like that, because at that point it was looking rather blocky. He took me into another room where a group of second year students were creating something (I didn’t catch what they were making, exactly) out of metal plates. We went up to this machine that basically looked like a pole that spun really fast, horizontally. He put the ring on the pole so it couldn’t move, and turned on the machine. I started, then, with really grainy sand paper, fixing it into a perfect circle. I held the sand paper onto the spinning ring, and after a while of occasionally decreasing the roughness of the sandpaper, I ended up with a perfectly shiny, circular, beautiful wooden ring!
I’m wearing it right now, actually, but I’ve since spent the entire week sanding it to perfection (I wanted to make it smaller width-wise, so that took a while), but I think it might be the coolest souvenir I’ll end up with from this trip, or at least one of them. Other than that, it’s been a pretty typical, amazing week here at Hanggao.
No comments:
Post a Comment