Our plane ride was good. No major hitches. Aric says that it seemed like less than 14 hours on our long flight, but I disagree. I felt all 14 hours of it after sitting for so long! We then made it through customs and didn't get held in quarantine for the H1N1 virus (wheww...the girl in front of us was coughing and had a runny nose...ugh). What we were really amazed by on our flight was that we flew over the arctic circle. That's right, they went from Toronto, over the North Pole, over Siberia, and came into China that way...really neat!

We got into China around 3:30 PM (2:30AM Central Time). We're 13 hours ahead of those of you in Kansas. It kind of twists my brain trying to think about the time differences.

We ate our first Chinese dinner after we got in. We went out with 4 other teachers (two of whom have lived in China for a few years, not in the Shanghai area though). It was very helpful to have them with us. Aric and I do not know very much Chinese, which makes it difficult. We each ordered a dish and decided to all share so we could try them all. I ordered fish with brown garlic sauce. When it cam it was a whole fish...with a head and tail! I didn't even think about that happening. It was a freshwater fish and wasn't very good (more than likely from the polluted waters).

We've learned that China is a very loud and dirty place; at least it is when it rains (muddy water). The sky is only a light tint of blue because of the constant pollution haze. The first thing we noticed getting off of the airplane was the humidity! Wow...no need for a sauna.

Aric and I went on our first shopping experience. We went to a large superstore called Trust-Mart, which was recently purchased by Wal-Mart. We saw a few "Great Value" brand things, just like Wal-Mart. However, everything is written in Chinese (not pinyin, but full Mandarin symbols). Shampoo was very difficult to figure out. We managed to get our necessities. Our big purchase was a rice cooker!

For those of you that are Facebook users, we are unable to connect because of the restrictions over here.

Aric says "Hi"

--Melanie

8/21/2009

written by  AricMelanie on August 21 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
tagged AricMelanieCherryShanghaiChina
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Also, the time at the bottom of each entry says 12 AM. Not true. I'll try to include the time with the date on the rest of the blogs.

Aric says "Hello, again"
--Melanie

8/21/2009 6:30 PM

written by  AricMelanie on August 21 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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Today was our first day with something official to do! We had to sign our contracts today. After a pretty deep sleep (we are still soo tired), I woke up early to the bright sunlight (this will be a helpful alarm clock), construction noise (we're already learning to tune it out), and morning drills for the Shanghai High students. They wear uniforms that look like blue track/jogging pants with a white t-shirt. There are drill sergeants that wear army camo gear and yell loudly. We don't know much about this morning drill session yet. The only info we know is what we can see outside. When we figure it out we'll try to let you know. After waking up about an hour early, I found a Freddie Prince Jr. movie on TV (we have 4 English channels: BBC, CNN, Discovery, and a movie channel). Aric is watching TV now and found "Juno" on the movie channel. We were also able to figure out how to change the TV menu settings to English, very exciting stuff!

The contract signing went well. We learned some more information and were very glad that there was an English contract for us to sign. It is a little nerve wracking to sign a contract written in Chinese. We learned more about the work Visa process, the National Holiday (first week in Oct.), sick leave, the doctor (free acupuncture and massages along with other things), the school day, and more! Our office hours are from 8:10 to 4:10 (here that would be 8:10 to 16:10...no need for AM and PM this way). The director came and spoke to me about my class schedule (no one knows their schedule yet or what they're teaching--Tuesday we find out). I will have 2 sixth grade native English classes, another English class and I think two more classes (geography, maybe). This will put me over the normal working hours (normal class hours is 20). She said that I would get paid for the extra hours.

Next, we went with Darren and Kate (they got married in May, Darren works at a business in Shanghai and Kate is teaching at the school. Darren taught at the school in 2004 and Kate has visited Shanghai about 4 times but never lived here for a long period of time. Darren speaks Mandarin pretty well and knows the area.) We took a Taxi into the city (we live in Shanghai, but more in the outskirts). Our venture was to get cell phones for Aric and myself. We went to a 6 floor mall that had many different Western brands. This was pretty neat to see. We first went to get our SIM cards at China Mobile. It was an adventure. We were glad that we had someone with us who could speak the language. The cell phone plans here are "pay as you go." We had to buy the SIM card (10 RMB (divide it by 7 to get USD)) and then buy the phone. The SIM cards we saw yesterday that the street stores were selling were much more expensive: 60 RMB. We also added minutes to our phones. When you run out of minutes, you go to a convenience type store; buy more minutes, on the receipt is a phone number that you call that adds the minutes that you just bought to your phone. It was at China Mobile that we heard our first English song being played on the loudspeaker in the mall: "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira. In order to get the SIM cards though, we first had to pick our numbers. In China, the unlucky number is 4, so they don't like to get phone numbers with 4's in them. We didn't care, and were glad to take the 4's off of their hands. We then had to sign all of these forms written in Chinese, and they had to take a copy of our passports. So...we could have signed our souls to China, but really, I think that we're okay. :-)

Next, we went to find our phones. Kate got her phone yesterday for 400 RMB (no frills or anything, not even a camera, simple text and call phone). We were estimating about that much for ourselves. Almost the whole floor in this mall was full of cell phones. We looked around and compared a lot of the different prices. Most of the cheaper models were about 380 RMB, but one lady wanted to sell us a phone for 900 RMB. After searching a bit and talking with the salespeople (well...as much as we could communicate), we found two phones. Mine is a Motorola, Aric's is a Nokia. We haggled a bit on the price (we're proud of ourselves for that!) and got both of the phones for 500 RMB...pretty sweet deal. They were helpful enough to even change the mode to English for us.

After the cell phones we decided to find a place to eat lunch. We found a pretty nice looking restaurant on one of the streets and decided to eat there. It was called "Chinese Colour," or so we think. We were given a photo menu so we could see what we were ordering. After looking through the menu several times, Aric and I found dishes that we thought we'd like. Kate and Darren found their dishes too. The dishes came out one at a time, so we all shared. Kate had Tofu which tasted like the Tofu that we had on our first night here, pretty mushy and spicy. We were all glad that we had bought water bottles on the street before we went to the restaurant (BYOW: bring your own water). Next came my dish. It turns out that it was CHICKEN FEET! Seriously...I cannot order well from Chinese menus. First the fish with the head and tail, and now chicken feet. Aric and I were very brave and both tried the feet. You kind of gnaw the meat off of the bone like chicken wings, only there is very little/no meat. Honestly, it felt like I was nibbling a dead finger (not that I've done that, but I would guess that's what it would be like). Oh My! Darren's fish came next, it was okay--pretty spicy as well; a very odd texture too. Aric's beef was pretty good, but SUPER spicy. The "bread" was good (more like a crepe-ish flat cheesy textured eggish thing, but good!), and the asparagus' cousin type vegetable was pretty good. Our watermelon that we had for dessert was pretty tasty...that was a bonus! We deduced that the restaurant is a spicy restaurant, if we could read Chinese, we would have probably known that before we decided to eat there. At the restaurant we also discovered that you must pay for napkins. They only cost a few USD pennies. We found out that they are tissues (like the travel Kleenex packs--we got a whole pack). After we left the restaurant, we saw an Applebee's...oh how I wished we went there!

We then went to a Western grocery store...amazing! They had so many things there that we are familiar with! We won't buy much there because it is so expensive, but we'll get a few things that we need. For example, breakfast food--we don't have any and it is custom to eat noodles for breakfast here. We forked over about 60 RMB for our Honey-Nut Cheerios, but are super excited about them! We also picked up some garlic powder. Aric has really wanted Pop-Tarts...and we found some! We didn't go crazy there and buy Hamburger Helper, Mac & Cheese, or other Western delicacies. We only wanted to spend the big bucks on the essentials.

Last night for dinner I made rice for the first time in our rice cooker. I burnt the first batch. It is very hard to follow instructions in a language that you can't read. I did pretty well with the pictures, but I had to guess on the amount of rice and the amount of water. I didn't put in enough water...mmmm...burnt rice! We threw it out and tried again. It was good the second time. Except...we didn't have any bowls!!! We bought forks/chopsticks, but nothing to eat out of or on. Being the resourceful people that we are, we took one of our empty water bottles, cut it in half, and had two bowls! (Of course leaving the lid on one end.) We are so smart :-)

One of our next needed purchases (besides the tableware) is a larger purse for me. I was pretty happy with my small purse in the US, it was so much easier--I didn't really have a need for a lot of things in it. However, here we need many things. We must have hand sanitizer, wet wipes, travel tissues (if there are non-western toilets), a camera, our travel umbrella (it rains a lot and you can't tell when because so far the sky has been pretty gray constantly (I think it is smog)), a map, and a pocket English/Chinese dictionary. along with all of the basic purse items. Whewww....that makes one full bag!

We didn't bring the camera when we went further into the city today. We were so bummed! That is why the bigger purse is one a priority list now....along with all of the other reasons I listed above.

I uploaded some more pictures, I'll try to explain what they are in the captions, so even if they get out of order, you can still figure it out! (There is no way to rearrange them.)

Note on our cellphones: we randomly get text messages in Chinese. When we ask each other who the texts are from, the answer is always, "China" or "The Man."

Tomorrow we don't have big plans. We can't eat after 8:00 PM...oh wait, I mean 20:00 ;-) because of our health check on Monday morning.

Aric says "Hi."
We wish you the best!
Zaijian (Goodbye) pronounced: Szay jen
-Melanie
--Edited by Aric
8/22/09 6:15 PM

written by  AricMelanie on August 22 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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We had a very successful day today. It started out very slow. We woke up quite early: 4:30 AM! However, we did get our 8+ hours of sleep, so we were feeling pretty good. I was excited to be up during the afternoon Kansas time, hoping that maybe I could catch some people online. I'm still working on adding more people to my Google chat list. Skype works in China, but the proxy server that the school uses doesn't get along with Skype very well. We're still working on adjusting our proxy settings in order to get video feed with our Google chat, but the audio works great, so it is just like a phone call! Download "Google Talk" if you would like to talk to us for free. We apologize to all of the Skype users; we'll see what we can do to get around the proxy address.

Our blog was down this morning. This really made us worry that it was blocked. However, we are able to get on it now. We hate to say it, but we may be switching blog sites again. We hate to drag you along with moving to our third site, but we're still adjusting to this whole blog thing with censored internet. We've found another blog site that seems a lot more user friendly. We will probably switch to that sometime soon (depending on how photos upload there...I'm not pleased with what this site has to offer). We are currently building our own domain name. It isn't up and running yet, so I can't give you the address (we have it though!). If we can get that site up and running in a user friendly fashion, we'll probably switch to that. We're sorry if this is complicated or confusing for anyone! Bear with us.

Aric made rice for lunch in our rice cooker...yum! Our goal today was to get more food...rice doesn't really offer much variety when you don't have anything to put on it. We don't have any exciting food stories today...sorry if you were looking forward to hearing about more exciting food adventures. Don't worry; I'm sure more will come.

We went to a crash course in Chinese at 1:00PM today, it was a whirlwind in short phrases that will help us when we're out and about. We also met a lot of new foreign teachers. All very nice. We took a taxi to the Carrefor shop. It is a nicer Trust-Mart. They have a few different brands. We purchased some cooking items, so now we have a working kitchen. Yay! Now we can cook more than just rice. On our way back it was pouring rain and loud thunder/lightning. Storms are different here. I'm not sure how to describe how they are different, but they seem much less severe and the sky doesn't change too much (at least that' what we've experienced so far). It has rained every day since we've been here. The rain helps cool it off a bit, so that's good. We got to experience getting a taxi in the rain...very difficult, everyone wants one. The rain lessened when we went to get the taxi, but then when we got to the school gates (the school is 60 acres, so it is a bit of a walk to our apartment from the gate), it was pouring! We carried all of our purchases back in the rain. We were soaked. One good purchase that we made on our first full day here was a few large canvas bags to take with us grocery shopping. They charge for plastic bags (equivalent to a few pennies) and the canvas bags allow us to carry a lot more for a long distance.

After we got back to the school, Aric and I left to get a few more items at Trust-Mart. Here we were able to get an ironing board (we already have an iron), more cleaning supplies and FOOD! I loved shopping for the food. It is so interesting! We don't go near the fresh meat/fish section. The smell is not very appealing. We learned that the milk here is stamped with the production date instead of the expiration date. This was a little confusing. Luckily, the gentleman standing next to me spoke a bit of English and knew what I was meaning when I pointed to the date and quizzically asked, "Yesterday?" I thought that all of the milk was expired! I think that the Chinese get a kick out of watching me shop for things. I must be very entertaining! They are also very eager to help and sell us things. We broke out our Chinese/English pocket dictionary (very handy) and were able to ask about matches and internet cords, but the store didn't have what we wanted for either item. I really really wanted a Swiffer (our floor gets pretty dirty with all of the rain, even though we now have a rule that you do not wear shoes in the apartment...which is customary in China). We searched and couldn't find any product that was similar to a Swiffer. I ventured off to find some type of Swiffer-ish mop and was "attacked" by all different people trying to help me, and sell me one of the brooms. Although we couldn't communicate through talking, I was able to get across what I wanted, and found a Swiffer-ish mop that has washable cloths instead of the disposable kind that a Swiffer is known for. They were very adamant that I needed to get the sturdy mop and not the flimsy one (I was able to get the jist of that from our communication gap). While this whole charade was happening, Aric stood at the end of the aisle and just laughed at the scene. I'll admit, it was rather comical.

Our most exciting experience of the day was getting a water system in our apartment! Our Dorm Guard (like an RD), Larry, hooked us up with a Culligan type system. It has the two spigots (hot and cold) and the big water jug that sits upside-down on top. It only cost 70 RMB for the machine, 30 for the first jug, and 14 for every jug after that. Hooray!!! We don't have to ration our drinking water anymore! We were surprised at how cheap it was too :-) Sooo excited!!!

I really want to take a lot of pictures while we're shopping so you can have a better idea of what the stores are like, but everyone stares at me enough that I'm not sure I can handle the added attention that a camera would give. I did take a few though. Hopefully I'll get better.

Even though I didn't take many during our shopping experience, I still have lots of photos to upload today. I'll try to caption them the best that I can.

Tomorrow is the start of our orientation. We couldn't eat after 8:00 PM tonight because of our health check tomorrow. I know that we'll learn a lot tomorrow...wish us luck!

Aric says "Hi"

-Melanie

8/23/09 9:45 PM

written by  AricMelanie on August 23 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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This morning was our official health check for the Chinese government in order to get our work/multiple entry Visas. We weren't allowed to eat for 12 hours before the health test. First we filled out some paperwork. Next, we took our passports and the paperwork to a table of medical workers, and then we had our blood drawn. Next we waited and waited and then finally got to go to the medical bus (they brought the hospital to us, so we didn't have to go into the city to them). Inside the bus they took an x-ray, did an ultra-sound of our guts, and then did the general blood pressure and vision test. Overall it wasn't too bad, but we didn't get done until 11:00 AM! However, we did get to know a lot of the other teachers better while we were waiting between all of the tests. When we were done, we finally got breakfast! We were looking forward to it all morning. Little did we know that it wasn't what we expected for breakfast. We tried several different ways to describe the delicacy that we ate this morning: shredded pork, creamy sweet mayonnaise, and an onion roll; a shredded pork hot dog meets a Twinkie; shredded hairy pork substance, cream donut filling, and an eggy bread. No matter what we called it, it wasn't what our palettes desired. We were also given milk (from a box with a straw, much like the kid juice boxes). It was room temperature and tasted like half and half creamer. It wasn't too bad, but I would have preferred it cold.

We had our first lunch in the cafeteria today. It was interesting. We will definitely have to remember to take our water bottles, since drinks are not served with the meals here; they typically have a bowl of soup with their meal. One of our foreign affairs liaisons recommended the pork riblet-ish pieces to me. I'm glad that he did, they were good. I also had some strange tofu noodles; they were good too. I picked up a banana, and it was very sweet (they were quite popular among everyone).

After lunch we got to meet the returning foreign teachers (there are 70 foreign teachers in all). We also got a lot more information about the school. There are about 2,300 students in the international division and about 1,200 other students (just from the Shanghai area). The two groups do not mix. The students doing all of the drills in the morning are freshman that go to Shanghai High School (not the international division). The drills are a type of freshman initiation.

We learned that in the buildings they have wireless internet, checked out our online grade book/communication network. I learned that being a homeroom teacher comes with a lot of added responsibility. I looked at my tentative schedule and I have two sections of 6th grade native English (my students will be native English speakers, so I won't be teaching ESL), and one section of 4th grade native English, along with a special section for homeroom, besides the daily morning homeroom. I don't understand it all yet, but that is what this orientation week is for :-) Aric had to have an individual talk with the director, and he found out that he won't have a schedule yet. As of now he is more of a "floater." If teachers don't show up this year (like returning teachers who said they are coming back), he will get their classes. He may also get some classes from the high school level because they usually overbook them. He is thrilled about this news! We were also given the teacher handbook (lots and lots of resources for us to use in our classrooms) as well as the teacher rule book (a pretty thick book that is half in Chinese and half in English. This is where we find all of the important policies we need to know so we don't screw up! I was able to see a roster of kids in each of my classes. I have some very western names and some names that will take me a bit to remember how to pronounce. One of my classes is huge! I didn't count the number, but it looked like a lot.

After orientation, we decided to go into the city with our neighbors (Juni and Ron; they got married two years ago and two weeks after their wedding moved to Japan to teach English, now after two years in Japan, they decided to try out China). We walked to the subway station near the school (about a 15 min journey). We then took the subway to the French District and found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant to eat in. It was actually pretty good. I was a little worried at first. My favorite was this collard green/snow peas/soy bean dish. We also had some tofu. It was the same tofu dish that I see everywhere. The really soft squishy tofu and sauce. This was apparently a pork sauce. It was decent when mixed with rice. We had a fried chicken dish, but I didn't eat any. (I haven't been in the mood for chicken since I tried the feet.) The chicken had a lot of little bones in it. It wasn't until after we were finished eating that Juni started examining the bones and pieces of the fried chicken that she didn't eat, that we realized that there were still feathers on the chicken. The chicken was fried with the feathers on. Interesting...

We then walked around a bit and found this big open square area that people were dancing in. It was really neat! They played some upbeat songs, some slower songs, and we heard one country-western type song. I met an older man there who struck up a conversation with me. He asked where I was from, and I told him "USA." He said, "Oh, America. Good! America good!" Then he mentioned a few large cities in the US: Washington D.C., New York, etc. I told him that I'm from Kansas. He said, "Oh, Kansas...mmmhhmmm." Then he did some type of country-western hoedown jig or he was plowing a field. Then he realized, “Yao Ming, Houston. Yes, Yao Ming, Houston! Houston, Yao Ming!" I agreed, and we both mimed shooting a basketball. Then the country-western song came on and he noted that this was a Kansas song and did the little square-dance jig again. He was pretty funny and it was nice that he spoke a little English. I've officially had my first full conversation with someone who doesn't speak English very much.

I found a bigger bag to hold all of my now needed things. We knew that we had to get one off of the street (we didn't want to pay a lot). We found a decent one for 38 RMB (about $5.50 or so), pretty good deal! I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems like it'll work.

We didn't make it to The Bund or People's Square (the heart of Shanghai), but were very very close. We chose the shopping street instead. We took a taxi back to the school. I got very nauseous on the ride back and was quite afraid of throwing up in the taxi. Aric's arm got sore from fanning me to cool me off and make me feel a bit better.

Tomorrow is another day of orientation. This is when we really get started learning about teaching the classes and meet our mentors (we each get a mentor since we're first year teachers here).

Aric says "Hi" again.

-Melanie
8/24/09 11:30 PM

written by  AricMelanie on August 24 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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Our Trip for the Shanghai Airport (video by Aric): [p>[a href="http://vimeo.com/6247322">Our Ride from the Airport in Shanghai 8/19/09[/a> from [a href="http://vimeo.com/user2207972">Melanie Cherry[/a> on [a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo[/a>.[/p>[p>Just a short video of our first experience on the streets in China. Nothing too overly exciting.[/p>

written by  AricMelanie on August 24 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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We started the day with a lot of basic guideline information about our apartments. Next we learned about the school curriculum. It is pretty interesting. There are two thousand kids in the international division. Students cannot attend the international division if they have Chinese passports. Strictly students from other countries (most of them are living in China now, but the school also serves as a boarding school for those who are not). The local section of the school is very prestigious. Many higher-ups in the government of China attended SHS (http://www.shs.sh.cn/english/Introduction.htm). We then met some of the administration (department heads and section directors). Next, we went over English standards (both oral and written).

The levels of the English section are very interesting (these levels are similar to levels of other classes as well). The lowest level is ESL (they don't speak much English at all), next is English Non-Native Standard, then English Non-Native S+ (Standard Plus), followed by English Native Standard, English Native S+, and finally the top is English Native Honors. The highest of high levels when you get to the High School is the International Baccalaureate section. If a student graduates with top ranks from this section, they can basically choose any university in the world they would like to attend.

We got our schedules today. I have two 6th Grade Native English (standard level) classes, one 4th Grade Native English class (standard level), and I am a co-homeroom teacher in the 4th Grade with a Chinese colleague. All of the homerooms have one Foreign Teacher and one Chinese Teacher. The primary section is grades 3-5, so I am one of two teachers who teach both primary and middle grades. We both teach 6th grade English, but he has the Honors class. We will work together to plan all of our lessons and such (all of the Foreign Teachers work on a team-teaching system).

Aric is teaching a theatre class that meets once a week so far. More will be added to his schedule as it comes up. He's pretty excited about his open schedule.

For the first few weeks I will have to walk my homeroom students to 1 of 3 parking lots at the school at the end of the day (3rd grade teachers have to do this throughout the year). There are over 100 buses that come to the school to pick up kids! We have to make sure they make it on the right bus. Homeroom teachers are the first rank up the ladder for subject teachers to contact if there is a problem with a student.

This evening we cooked our first meal in our apartment (not counting the rice from our rice cooker). The plan was to have some noodles with "Special Sauce" (no joke, that's what it was called) and some fried chicken that we found in the frozen section. It seemed safe; we decided to give it a try. This was my first go at using the gas stove. It proved to be somewhat difficult for me. I didn't like the flame, I was afraid that I would burn the pot holders (we mistakenly chose a pot that has handles that get hot). There doesn't seem to be a way to adjust the flame, so the pot would boil over if I left it on the burner. It was quite a task. I decided to microwave the chicken (the package said that it was okay). Oh...the noodles had English and Chinese directions...woohoo! But...the chicken was only in Chinese. There was a picture of a frying pan and a microwave on the directions for the chicken, so I knew that either was okay. I put the chicken in the microwave to defrost. We had hopes that it would be boneless chicken strips, but knew that it would more than likely have bones in it. After it was done defrosting, I took it out of the microwave, and it had bones in it, but there was also blood oozing out of it! Ewww. No chicken for us tonight. Aric was a kind gentleman and took the chicken outside to the trash for me. The noodles were good (47% of our daily salt intake) and we also had some chocolate covered sunflower seeds. Mmmm...thanks Grandma Cherry.

Tomorrow starts another day of orientation. We meet with our mentors tomorrow I think. We also picked up our books today (not the teacher editions yet, but the student editions). They look pretty good. I recognize most of them (they are Macmillan/McGraw-Hill; I saw other people had Scott-Forsman (spelling?)).

We're still working on our new website. Hopefully we can get it up and running in the next week or so...After that we will be busy until we get into the swing of things.

We've really enjoyed reading all of your comments! We're glad that you're enjoying our blog :-)

Aric says "Hi."

-Melanie

8/25/09 9:45 PM

written by  AricMelanie on August 25 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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The majority of our working hours today were spent in orientation. Aric found out more of what he is doing. He basically has the job that all of the foreign teachers envy. He his the English tutor in the library. His theatre class got taken away from him (the person who gave it away wanted it back).

I met my co-homeroom teacher today. Here English name is Stella. Last year was her first year teaching. She spent a few years studying in Australia. She's very nice. I now also have keys to my office and desk. My desk was quite messy because the person before me left all of their old papers in it! I picked up the rest of my books--quite a heavy load. Now I have all of the teacher's editions and student editions. I'm set to go!

Tomorrow we have the big talks from the U.S. Embassy, the Chinese Police, and then we have a banquet. It should be a pretty good day. Friday we have another banquet in the evening. I'll meet my homeroom kids on Monday. There aren't any classes, but the primary school homeroom teachers come so the kids and parents can meet them and pick up their books/get their schedules.

Note on the chicken from yesterday: I

written by  AricMelanie on August 26 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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