We spent the better part of the morning on a bus tour of Shanghai. Our guide was this guy named Eric (I can't remember his Chinese name right now), who was born in Jiangsu Province, but migrated to Shanghai for his studies back in 2002. Eric was very knowledgable of the areas and landmarks we would be touring, and provided a lot of background to the various areas of Shanghai we would seeing.
When he was talking about the former, foreign concession areas of Shanghai, it helped to have some background in the Opium Wars, courtesy of Sylla's History class at LPC. You could definitely see and feel the British and French influences on the architecture of the areas that have long been returned to China.
One weakness of the tour was the fact that we never crossed into Pudong, ie the eastern part of Shanghai, which holds the financial district and all of the famous buildings that people would associate with the city. That's to take anything away from Puxi, where we spent most of our tour. It's good that we spent a lot of time with our "ears to the ground", and with only 3 hours to tour a city of 20 million people, it was definitely a good introduction. But I've got to do more exploring on my own wants the chance arises.
After the tour, it was back to campus for our placement exam. It was good to know beforehand that our performance didn't matter so much, since we could change classes if we found them to be too difficult or too easy once we were placed. I will say it was a bit unnerving having to speak for 10 minutes non-stop with 3 teachers including the head of language study all in Mandarin. Well, I got through it, and now all there is to do is wait and see.
I'll have pictures of the various spots on the tour up soon.
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