One of the first tasks on my long list of things to do was to orient myself to my new surroundings, my new neighborhood, the campus, this district. Where can I buy food, where is the nearest bus stop, where does it go, how can I find the metro, where is the nearest McDonald’s, etc. I spent much of my drizzly Monday set to this task. Fudan’s campus is located in the northern Yangpu district, sort of halfway between the downtown, Bund area and the city’s Yangtze River border to the north. It’s a quiet, sprawling district, home to several very large universities (Fudan, Shanghai School of Economics, Tongji U., to name a few), a few shopping plazas, and suburban style apartment blocks. There are trees in this area, relatively quiet streets, decent buses, it seems nice. And will probably be really nice in the spring.
I walked around the campus on Monday, hell bent on finding my particular school, Fudan’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs. I say hell bent because up to this point I’ve received very little information about my program, when and how to register for classes, who I need to check in with, and all that. It’s frustrating. I’m a planner. I like to know what’s going on. I thought maybe I could find the school and start poking around, ask some questions. Most of my emails have gone unanswered. I know there’s a language barrier issue but I do speak some Chinese and my program is taught in English. My suspicions are the buildings to my school are empty for the holidays, especially for the never ending Chinese New Year.
But either way I also more generally wanted to check out the campus. Step one. Find the cafeteria. My girlfriend and I heard the student cafeterias were opening this week so we wanted to check that out, get some cheap grub. We walked in to the large canteen located in our section of the campus, near the foreign student dorms, and found it bustling with Chinese students and staff. University cafeterias in China are huge and industrial, well oiled machines of mass food production. We walked through the large glass door frame, struggling with the large plastic curtains that hang from the entrance to keep the warm air in, to find a warehouse of activity. Along the inner walls were window after window of various cafeteria style displays of food. Each window had a few servers and a long line of Chinese students. Above each window was a list of about ten or so different dishes, all in Chinese characters, and much to our dismay, no prices, meaning we wouldn’t be able to use cash. We needed student cards, cards we weren’t yet issued, cards we could load with money and scan for food. Let down and awfully hungry, we wandered around the cafeteria without a plan.
But luck was on our side. Through the sea of Chinese students we honed in on a pair of western-looking students. My girlfriend and I looked at each other and as moths drawn to light, walked up to the foreigners and asked them for help. It’s amazing how easy it is to spot foreigners in Chinese cities. Chinese people all drum to the same beat and foreigners, expats, international students, tourists, never seem to really figure it out. There’s just no blending in. Whether it’s the way they dress, the way they walk, or talk, or look around, or listen to music, or talk on the phone, Chinese people do it differently, in their own way. Of course, we managed to find the only two foreign students in the cafeteria, walked up to them and asked them how this all works. They confirmed our suspicions that we needed student cards to pay for food. But they offered to help. The other odd thing about foreigners in China is that we have this inherent urge to help one another. Like those of us who know better have been there before. Have been dazed and confused and at times, utterly helpless. And because we have been there before, we want to help the newbies. Charlotte from Ireland and Hayden from Australia knew just what to do. Me, “Hey, can you speak English?” Them, “Oh, yeah no worries, what’s up?” “How does this work? Sorry, we’re new.” They explained the process, lent us their cards so we could get lunch which we paid back to them in cash, and let us sit with them. Super cool people. Expatriate camaraderie.
After lunch my girlfriend broke off to register for her language classes and I continued to wander around campus. It’s a very attractive place and has some interesting, quirky statues, including a giant smiling Mao Zedong at the main entrance, some traditional Chinese gates, and some traditional gardens and buildings. Fudan is split into two main parts, each divided by a highway that runs east/west. After wandering around the northern half of campus I crossed over to the less ceremonial, more academic southern half. I found my building after some difficulty. The School of International Relations and Public Affairs is actually the sixth floor of the large Liberal Arts building. And the whole building was locked, “winter vacation”, I later learned.
I kept wandering. I poked down some side streets along the edges of the southern half of campus. In the distance, as this walk was starting to become more residential, I spotted a crowd gathering in the middle of a quiet intersection around two cars, one crunched into the side of another. A policeman was standing in the middle of the crowd talking to another man and writing some things on a notepad. No one seemed hurt. Fender bender. The crowd of about thirty huddled in closely around the policemen, next to the cars, and consisted of passers by, nearby shop keeps, me, scooter riders with apparently no rush to get wherever they’re going, and the perpetrators. The middle of the intersection was a buzz with activity, completely blocking traffic, forcing other cars to partially roll onto the sidewalk to get around.
But I had been wandering around long enough and I was beat from walking and thoroughly soaked through. I trudged back to the room to rest and dry off.
Part of getting to know the neighborhood is getting to know your fellow expatriates. In this case, other Fudan international students. There is a few western bars in the area outside of the campus and one of them is sort of legend for the international student crowd here. Helen’s is a large restaurant and bar, set above street level. They serve burgers and pizza and beer. A sort of refuge for the exchange students from the ubiquitous Chinese noodle shops that dot the streets nearby. And a good hangout and place to meet other foreigners. The inside looks like a sort of tiki bungalow with long wooden tables and benches. These tables wrap around the central bar on three sides and the waiters and waitresses speak English. My girlfriend had met some people in line at registration for her language classes and we went to go meet some of them at Helen’s in the evening. After a beer in the dormitory lobby area we walked over to the bar and found the group, a large one, maybe eight or so people, mostly Kiwis. And thus began our night.
Even before we were sat down and had fully taken off our jackets we were invited “out” with the group. Going out in China means going to the club. It’s what international students do in China. And we needed a head count. We had a met a student that knew a promoter. A promoter is a person whose job it is to fill their Chinese club with foreigners. They do this by networking and making contact with expats and foreign students, enticing them to come out to their club, getting them on a list for free entry, and getting them a table with free bottle service. So everything is free. Tables with bottle service usually costs a group hundreds of dollars plus the cost of the alcohol. It’s an absurd concept. The reason the clubs pay these promoters to give free everything and VIP service to random foreigners is because they believe that a club packed with foreigners will draw in the rich Chinese crowd who can afford to pay for the normal service. But they won’t come if the club is empty. And apparently if the club is full of foreigners, it appears that the club is more successful. It’s pretty unfair to the Chinese club goers and I couldn’t tell you if they know that we get this stuff for free. On the other hand it’s hard to say no to a free evening at a premier club in Shanghai. We did this all the time in Chengdu but then again it was Chengdu, a city with a far smaller expat crowd. I was a little surprised to see the promoters in Shanghai too.
After a few rounds of Tsing Tao beer we got our group together and hopped a couple of cabs. It was about 11 at night. Fudan is annoyingly far by cab to get downtown but luckily cabs in China are very reasonably priced. Thirty minutes in the cab costs each of the four of us about two dollars. We found the club. From where I got out of the cab I watched as a middle aged Chinese man in a suit propped open one of the industrial, back doors to the large building that housed the club and proceeded to drag two very large disco balls, each by a string, the little shiny bits of reflective glass scraping along the sidewalk, about twenty yards to a paved space in a back alley lot where a large pile of these disco balls were just sitting in a pyramid next to a pile of garbage. I watched him do this for about thirty seconds. The others with me, completely unfazed, started to head for the entrance and I joined them as we waited for the others to arrive.
We were met at the door by the promoter, a very tall, thin, blonde Czech guy with a goofy but cool demeanor, wearing a tuxedo and shiny black shoes. He shook our hands and asked our names. He showed us through the entrance, where to check our coats, and led us past the bouncer and past the long line of Chinese club goers awaiting entry. We were taken into the thick of this large club and directly to our table, adjacent to the dance floor and right below the DJ booth where two large basins of ice were filled with bottles of Belvedere Vodka. On the table were empty glasses and a few large plastic containers of juice. The promoter poured several glasses of juice and added the Belvedere to each, passing them around the group.
Chinese clubs are pretty unique to western standards. This particular club was like most other Chinese clubs I’ve been to but was much larger. Lounge tables were spread around the perimeter of the space where well dressed, upper twenties Chinese men with some swagger sat, surrounded by attractive women, cigarettes hanging from their mouths and unopened bottles of champagne laying around them. These particular Chinese men have money and park their sports cars in the front of the club entrance, along the sidewalk, where all can see them. I counted a Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and a fair few German luxury cars in the mix. In the middle of the club was a large dance floor sitting beneath a familiar disco ball. At one end was an elevated platform for the DJ, a resident DJ, it was a Wednesday night (school hasn’t started yet, don’t judge me), and the other end claimed the long bar, cool blue streaming along the shelves of imported bottles. Two long catwalks sprung from the DJ’s booth and led along either side of the dance floor. The beat hung heavy in the air as we screamed at one another to make conversation and remark how cool the place was. From time to time, the lights would go dark, the beat would get louder, and spotlights shined down on the catwalks where foreign dancers emerged and danced to a choreographed routine along the dance floor. It was impressive.
In addition to the bottles on the table we were given drink tickets at whim from the promoter from time to time with which we could use to claim free drinks by the bar. We spent the late hours going back and forth between the table, where we met other foreigners nabbed by promoters, and the dance floor. But as all evenings in the club go, the beat eventually resonates too loudly in the ears and the fog of cigarette smoke hangs just a little too heavily in those wee morning hours. We said our thanks to the promoter and took our leave, wearily hailing a cab back to the dorms.
Apart from the following morning, which I spent sleeping, I spent the rest of the week exploring. There are some great Chinese restaurants all along the road just outside the gate in our part of the campus. A healthy blend of both local and my favorite, western Chinese food styles like Sichuanese, Hunanese, Hui, and Uighur. My part of campus is convenient too in that nearby are a small Family Mart (Japanese 7 eleven), a bicycle repair shop, a tailor, a small fruit market, and other sundry conveniences. I’m slowly gaining a comfortable familiarity with my new neighborhood and I still find myself staring from time to time out at the city beyond, high up on my balcony. I think I’m going to like this corner of the city.
In the coming days I officially check in with the university and register for classes. I’ve read through the syllabuses and they seam like they’re going to be right up my alley. And I start with City Weekend magazine soon. It will be nice to be productive again.
Time to get to work.
I walked around the campus on Monday, hell bent on finding my particular school, Fudan’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs. I say hell bent because up to this point I’ve received very little information about my program, when and how to register for classes, who I need to check in with, and all that. It’s frustrating. I’m a planner. I like to know what’s going on. I thought maybe I could find the school and start poking around, ask some questions. Most of my emails have gone unanswered. I know there’s a language barrier issue but I do speak some Chinese and my program is taught in English. My suspicions are the buildings to my school are empty for the holidays, especially for the never ending Chinese New Year.
But either way I also more generally wanted to check out the campus. Step one. Find the cafeteria. My girlfriend and I heard the student cafeterias were opening this week so we wanted to check that out, get some cheap grub. We walked in to the large canteen located in our section of the campus, near the foreign student dorms, and found it bustling with Chinese students and staff. University cafeterias in China are huge and industrial, well oiled machines of mass food production. We walked through the large glass door frame, struggling with the large plastic curtains that hang from the entrance to keep the warm air in, to find a warehouse of activity. Along the inner walls were window after window of various cafeteria style displays of food. Each window had a few servers and a long line of Chinese students. Above each window was a list of about ten or so different dishes, all in Chinese characters, and much to our dismay, no prices, meaning we wouldn’t be able to use cash. We needed student cards, cards we weren’t yet issued, cards we could load with money and scan for food. Let down and awfully hungry, we wandered around the cafeteria without a plan.
But luck was on our side. Through the sea of Chinese students we honed in on a pair of western-looking students. My girlfriend and I looked at each other and as moths drawn to light, walked up to the foreigners and asked them for help. It’s amazing how easy it is to spot foreigners in Chinese cities. Chinese people all drum to the same beat and foreigners, expats, international students, tourists, never seem to really figure it out. There’s just no blending in. Whether it’s the way they dress, the way they walk, or talk, or look around, or listen to music, or talk on the phone, Chinese people do it differently, in their own way. Of course, we managed to find the only two foreign students in the cafeteria, walked up to them and asked them how this all works. They confirmed our suspicions that we needed student cards to pay for food. But they offered to help. The other odd thing about foreigners in China is that we have this inherent urge to help one another. Like those of us who know better have been there before. Have been dazed and confused and at times, utterly helpless. And because we have been there before, we want to help the newbies. Charlotte from Ireland and Hayden from Australia knew just what to do. Me, “Hey, can you speak English?” Them, “Oh, yeah no worries, what’s up?” “How does this work? Sorry, we’re new.” They explained the process, lent us their cards so we could get lunch which we paid back to them in cash, and let us sit with them. Super cool people. Expatriate camaraderie.
After lunch my girlfriend broke off to register for her language classes and I continued to wander around campus. It’s a very attractive place and has some interesting, quirky statues, including a giant smiling Mao Zedong at the main entrance, some traditional Chinese gates, and some traditional gardens and buildings. Fudan is split into two main parts, each divided by a highway that runs east/west. After wandering around the northern half of campus I crossed over to the less ceremonial, more academic southern half. I found my building after some difficulty. The School of International Relations and Public Affairs is actually the sixth floor of the large Liberal Arts building. And the whole building was locked, “winter vacation”, I later learned.
I kept wandering. I poked down some side streets along the edges of the southern half of campus. In the distance, as this walk was starting to become more residential, I spotted a crowd gathering in the middle of a quiet intersection around two cars, one crunched into the side of another. A policeman was standing in the middle of the crowd talking to another man and writing some things on a notepad. No one seemed hurt. Fender bender. The crowd of about thirty huddled in closely around the policemen, next to the cars, and consisted of passers by, nearby shop keeps, me, scooter riders with apparently no rush to get wherever they’re going, and the perpetrators. The middle of the intersection was a buzz with activity, completely blocking traffic, forcing other cars to partially roll onto the sidewalk to get around.
But I had been wandering around long enough and I was beat from walking and thoroughly soaked through. I trudged back to the room to rest and dry off.
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| Mao, standing watch by Fudan's main entrance gate |
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| Some small shops by the university, the car crash huddle taking place behind me |
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| A clear view from the Bund, the magazine office is a few blocks behind me |
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| Night vendors to meet the demands of returning club goers on a Saturday night |
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| A small, Japanese run coffee shop in the French Concession |
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| The view from my balcony, looking left down Wu Dong Lu |
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| And my view looking straight out, the Yangtze sits just behind the furthest buildings |
Even before we were sat down and had fully taken off our jackets we were invited “out” with the group. Going out in China means going to the club. It’s what international students do in China. And we needed a head count. We had a met a student that knew a promoter. A promoter is a person whose job it is to fill their Chinese club with foreigners. They do this by networking and making contact with expats and foreign students, enticing them to come out to their club, getting them on a list for free entry, and getting them a table with free bottle service. So everything is free. Tables with bottle service usually costs a group hundreds of dollars plus the cost of the alcohol. It’s an absurd concept. The reason the clubs pay these promoters to give free everything and VIP service to random foreigners is because they believe that a club packed with foreigners will draw in the rich Chinese crowd who can afford to pay for the normal service. But they won’t come if the club is empty. And apparently if the club is full of foreigners, it appears that the club is more successful. It’s pretty unfair to the Chinese club goers and I couldn’t tell you if they know that we get this stuff for free. On the other hand it’s hard to say no to a free evening at a premier club in Shanghai. We did this all the time in Chengdu but then again it was Chengdu, a city with a far smaller expat crowd. I was a little surprised to see the promoters in Shanghai too.
After a few rounds of Tsing Tao beer we got our group together and hopped a couple of cabs. It was about 11 at night. Fudan is annoyingly far by cab to get downtown but luckily cabs in China are very reasonably priced. Thirty minutes in the cab costs each of the four of us about two dollars. We found the club. From where I got out of the cab I watched as a middle aged Chinese man in a suit propped open one of the industrial, back doors to the large building that housed the club and proceeded to drag two very large disco balls, each by a string, the little shiny bits of reflective glass scraping along the sidewalk, about twenty yards to a paved space in a back alley lot where a large pile of these disco balls were just sitting in a pyramid next to a pile of garbage. I watched him do this for about thirty seconds. The others with me, completely unfazed, started to head for the entrance and I joined them as we waited for the others to arrive.
We were met at the door by the promoter, a very tall, thin, blonde Czech guy with a goofy but cool demeanor, wearing a tuxedo and shiny black shoes. He shook our hands and asked our names. He showed us through the entrance, where to check our coats, and led us past the bouncer and past the long line of Chinese club goers awaiting entry. We were taken into the thick of this large club and directly to our table, adjacent to the dance floor and right below the DJ booth where two large basins of ice were filled with bottles of Belvedere Vodka. On the table were empty glasses and a few large plastic containers of juice. The promoter poured several glasses of juice and added the Belvedere to each, passing them around the group.
Chinese clubs are pretty unique to western standards. This particular club was like most other Chinese clubs I’ve been to but was much larger. Lounge tables were spread around the perimeter of the space where well dressed, upper twenties Chinese men with some swagger sat, surrounded by attractive women, cigarettes hanging from their mouths and unopened bottles of champagne laying around them. These particular Chinese men have money and park their sports cars in the front of the club entrance, along the sidewalk, where all can see them. I counted a Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and a fair few German luxury cars in the mix. In the middle of the club was a large dance floor sitting beneath a familiar disco ball. At one end was an elevated platform for the DJ, a resident DJ, it was a Wednesday night (school hasn’t started yet, don’t judge me), and the other end claimed the long bar, cool blue streaming along the shelves of imported bottles. Two long catwalks sprung from the DJ’s booth and led along either side of the dance floor. The beat hung heavy in the air as we screamed at one another to make conversation and remark how cool the place was. From time to time, the lights would go dark, the beat would get louder, and spotlights shined down on the catwalks where foreign dancers emerged and danced to a choreographed routine along the dance floor. It was impressive.
In addition to the bottles on the table we were given drink tickets at whim from the promoter from time to time with which we could use to claim free drinks by the bar. We spent the late hours going back and forth between the table, where we met other foreigners nabbed by promoters, and the dance floor. But as all evenings in the club go, the beat eventually resonates too loudly in the ears and the fog of cigarette smoke hangs just a little too heavily in those wee morning hours. We said our thanks to the promoter and took our leave, wearily hailing a cab back to the dorms.
Apart from the following morning, which I spent sleeping, I spent the rest of the week exploring. There are some great Chinese restaurants all along the road just outside the gate in our part of the campus. A healthy blend of both local and my favorite, western Chinese food styles like Sichuanese, Hunanese, Hui, and Uighur. My part of campus is convenient too in that nearby are a small Family Mart (Japanese 7 eleven), a bicycle repair shop, a tailor, a small fruit market, and other sundry conveniences. I’m slowly gaining a comfortable familiarity with my new neighborhood and I still find myself staring from time to time out at the city beyond, high up on my balcony. I think I’m going to like this corner of the city.
In the coming days I officially check in with the university and register for classes. I’ve read through the syllabuses and they seam like they’re going to be right up my alley. And I start with City Weekend magazine soon. It will be nice to be productive again.
Time to get to work.
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