The blog continues... this time: Shanghai!

Hey everyone,

it has been too long since I last updated my blog. After arriving in Shanghai for an internship at BASF two months ago, and after several comments what happened to my blog ;) I finally realized that it would be a good idea to continue. So here it is, volume 2 of my blog: Shanghai impressions.

The first few weeks

I'm not gonna lie to you: the first few weeks were (again) challenging and exhausting. The first week I stayed at a hotel close to my office, which is located at a chemical park approximately one hour away from the city center. While getting adjusted to the work was already tiring enough, I had to travel to the city center every evening of the week, to find an appartment. After experiencing the vast crowded highways and the lack of restaurants, shops and weekend life in Pudong (the part of Shanghai where the office is), I knew I wanted to find an appartment in Puxi (the 'older' part of Shanghai, aka the city center). However, I noticed soon that distances here are unbelievably huge, compared to European cities and even compared to Taipei. It was difficult to decide on an area to live in, since even a single area in Shanghai can have several million inhabitants, distances to neighboring areas are huge, and it is impossible to walk anywhere unless the place you want to walk to is in a neigboring street. In the end, I decided on an area called Xujiahui, in the south of the center. Appartments there were in my price range (generally, appartments in Shanghai are quite expensive) and the many restaurants and shops, as well as the proximity to the bars and nightclubs of the French concession were just what I wanted. However, it takes me one and a half hours to get to work in the morning, via shuttlebus...

After one week, I found a nice appartment to live in, on the 21st floor with 3 housemates, who are all very nice and sociable, just what I needed after coming to Shanghai all alone. Below is a picture of the center of Shanghai and the area I live in:

After one month Jannes moved in. This is our room right now: Not bad, it even has a balcony!

Below is a picture of our living room. Don't worry, it doesn't always look like this: the picture was taken during our Halloween party.

Finally a picture of my neighborhood (bad quality because I took it with my phone):

It took me another two weeks to get adjusted to my new environment and my work. During that time, I got to know some people, went out to restaurants and bars and had a great time. Then September was already over and time seemed to have passed too quickly.

In the next blog entry I'll tell you about the trip to Vietnam in the beginning of October.