Oh goody – another email from our Rachael. She’s back from Shanghai, after visiting the tallest building in China. I’m assuming it’s the one on the left, although Google says it is not quite finished. Pretty neat looking, huh? (Rachael’s email is just below).

Ni Hao family,

I have a little cold right now, so I’m in the dorm on my computer. Yesterday the pollution was worse than I’ve ever seen it! It looked like San Francisco on a really bad day, except instead of fog-smog! Gross.

I got back from Shanghai on Wednesday absolutely wiped! We left on Friday night and took a sleeper train there. We spent our time in Shanghai wisely. I had my Chinese media class one morning and the next day we had a field trip. We visited a local newspaper publishing house (China Youth Daily) and the Shanghai TV station. They were broadcasting live while we were there about China going to the moon..very exciting. It was quite an experience being able to visit both forms of media. TV is obviously dominating in terms of money and circulation. However, they are both equally regulated. Everything published and broadcasted must follow “Party Policy”. There is no questioning or criticism, which makes reading a newspaper and watching the news extremely boring. Not to mention every form of media covers the same stories: China goes in Space, Olympics, Olympics, Milk Scandal….blah blah.

I also asked the editor in Chief what he liked about his job, and what he would change. This was a sugar coated form of, “what’s wrong with the system?”. He went on and on about how great the lifestyle is, and how proud and respected he is to have that position. He ignored the second part, so I asked again,” What would you change?” and he responded (in Chinese),”I don’t have time to think about that.” He had been working there for ten years! This mindset is very common. I met with a university student in Shanghai and also had a conversation about the media. She was very liberal in most things, but when I asked if she would try to change the system if she got a job in the media, she responded, “I would be too happy and proud to have that job, why would I want to risk it?”.

We visited the Bund (the area on the water surrounding the city), the French Concession, The Shanghai art Museum, and of course the largest building in Asia!! We paid and went to the top of it, to get the most beautiful view of Shanghai at night. It was 100 floors tall!

On the way back from Shanghai we went through Nanjing because we couldn’t get tickets directly back o Beijing. It was a national holiday this weekend, so everything was extremely crowded. The train station on the holiday was absolutely ridiculous!! It is very large (like a medium sized airport) and had lines out across the street to enter. Once we finally got into the building we had to wait about an hour for our train to arrive in a waiting room much larger than any airport terminal. Most people were sitting on the floors in the aisles. There were many different faces there. A lot of migrant workers going home for the holidays with small cloth bags and a wok. A lot of them had woks with them. There were also many Chinese tour groups with matching hats and a leader that would carry a flag with the same pattern as the hats. Most of these tour groups consisted of middle aged women and men very eager to get through the crowd. So we are all waiting for the gates to open, and as soon as they called it, chaos broke out. Hundreds of people swarmed, aggressively pushing and shoving to get through the door. I would be walking and then all of a sudden be elbowed in the gut by an eighty year old woman! Then before I knew it the Burberry hat tour group would trample me. Thank god some of my friends had blonde hair, it was easy to spot them! Once we were on the train all was good, very nice actually.

I’m back to the normal schedule now, which leaves little time for anything but school. I think we are going to the great wall this weekend of the weather permits it. I need to start my research project and college applications. So much to do, so little time!

I went to a huge French Wallmart-esq store called Carrefour and stocked up on good food! I’m getting a little sick of the food.ssshhh.
I must rest and kick this cold.
I love you guys and can’t wait to see you at Christmas!
Rach