Recording my life in Shanghai for posterity - AM

I've been uploading photos today and a few photos have inspired me to blog about them. Usually I'm pretty wordy and not as much a photo + writing person, but I realised that I like reading posts with pictures so I should try it out myself.
The picture below is a group shot of my 初二班一 (chu er ban yi) class, specifically comprehensive reading/grammar.



In the middle in the beige knit and glasses is my (and everyone else's) favourite teacher, Anna. It would be tough teaching such a boring topic (Chinese grammar) from a pretty mediocre textbook, but you could really tell she enjoyed teaching and she prepared in depth for her classes (which our speaking teacher CLEARLY did not). As a result you get students who actually want to come to class and who engage in the materials. I'm lucky I had her as my teacher because grammar, reading and writing are tougher to learn on your own. Speaking and listening can be learnt more easily and probably more efficiently just by watching TV, listening to music and going out and talking to Chinese people.

[Can you tell that I'm finding it tough writing from a photograph? It's a bit restrictive and making me overly descriptive as opposed to analytical (or critical) which I suppose I am. I think I keep switching points of view/tense too...]

A lot of my classmates are from Asian countries, with the exceptions being myself, Michelle (one of the girls directly behind me is also an Aussie) and the two non-Asians in the picture (German). Koreans and Japanese make up most of the international student population at Jiaotong University, which makes sense because of the proximity of both countries to China (Shanghai in particular being on the coastline) and the business between the countries.

It ends up being fairly important which class you end up in, because unless you have a lot of extracurricular activities or you're extremely outgoing I think that these are the people that you end up being friends with. Luckily for me, I liked most of the people in my class (besides a few that never spoke - possibly because they didn't speak English and very little Chinese) and made a few friends too. I know some people in other classes weren't as lucky to have such a sociable bunch of classmates.



I'm especially lucky because I had classmates who liked to go to lunch with me after class so I had lunch buddies! Most days at least one of these two lovely ladies ate with me (plus others) and ate a lot of food around the Xujiahui and Fanyu road area. My favourite has to be the Japanese place on Xinhua road that does tasty and filling "business lunch boxes" during the day (with yummo chawanmushi - steamed egg) and all you can eat and drink at night. You can't go wrong with a recommendation for Japanese FROM a Japanese right?

And that's my daytime life. Classes and food. Exciting huh?