Crazy Life

I bought a train ticket at the Shanghai station leaving tomorrow night (Tuesday Sept. 2nd) for Beijing. Unlike last time, which I have still not documented in the blog (but will soon, as I took notes on the experience in a moleskine), I will actually have a place to sleep this time, not just a hard plastic chair to sit on for 14 hours.

The Chinese train system is amazing though, to say the least. It always leads to an eventful experience that sticks in the mind forever.

The other day I spent four or five hours talking politics with two Chinese students around my age, a Chinese businessman, a road-worker, and a farmer. All walks of life end up on the trains, especially in the hard seat section.

Anyway, like I said, I am going to talk about that later. Maybe I already did write about it some....I can't remember clearly through the delirium of those few days.....


So here's what happened today as of 2:30pm:

I woke up at the semi-late hour of 10:30am and gave Brian from MRI Worldwide a text-message to see what time he wanted to meet up, just as he asked me to do yesterday. I sent the text, then proceeded to fall back a sleep for about thirty seconds before being woken by his nearly-instantaneous return text. He wanted to meet at 12:30pm at the Starbucks at Xintiandi 新天地, perhaps one of the nicest (if not the nicest) places in Shanghai.

No going back to sleep for me! I got up, ate a bowl of cereal, checked my email, and then listened to some music to try and ease my nerves prior to the interview.

Having brought absolutely nothing nice (as far as interviewing is concerned) to Shanghai, I had to borrow some dress-clothes from Daegan's roommate Christian, who is the man. Seriously, she lucked out having such a cool roommate.

At 12:00 I embarked for Xintiandi, arriving a few minutes early for the meeting. I ordered a drink for myself, then immediately regretted that, thinking it might have been rude to not wait on Brian before ordering. I considered finishing the drink really quickly and then pretending I never had one in the first place, but that seemed even more ridiculous.

So I just sat and waited.

Brian arrived exactly on time. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the meeting, but I will say that it was relaxed, and that it went quite well. Brian was a really cool guy, and he is going to set up a meeting for me with upper-management upon my return to Beijing in two days.

However, the Beijing and Shanghai debate is still waging on, for I don't know where I will be placed if a job is available.

Anyway, after Brian and I parted ways, I walked down Huangpi Street to the office where Daegan works, which happens to be only a few minutes from Xintiandi. Her office was really cool, and it was interesting to see the inside of a Chinese startup company building. So many different companies, mostly IT stuff, all getting something going....crazy stuff. I was mentioning to Daegan how nuts it is to think that Google started out in a place like that.


Now I am back in Xintiandi, and just spent too much money on a small cup of coffee at a coffeeshop. That's ok though because internet is free, and I'm going to milk it for a while here.....

Not too long though, because today is perhaps the prettiest day I have seen yet in China. I'm going to make sure I get out and see a bit more of Shanghai, and then tonight: more rock climbing! I can't wait.