Fly to Shanghai

Woke up at 6:30am-decent night's sleep despite the plywood bed. It's seriously only slightly better than a concrete slab. Went to the Western breakfast at the hotel...you know you're doing pretty well with chopsticks when you can use them to eat eggs, ham, sausage, O'Brien potatoes, and Chinese noodles for breakfast. Needed a spoon for the Froot Loops knockoff. We rode our bus for the last time on our trip to the airport.

I bought a bottle of Extra strawberry gum (Wrigley). The aspirin bottle packaging for gum is very popular in Asia. We flew China Eastern Airlines to Shanghai, which was a two hour flight. They served chicken and rice and showed short movie clips. Our tour chaperones for the school trip stayed behind in the airport to wait for the other 32 students to arrive in China, while six of us boarded our own van for the 2 hour drive to Suzhou, an industrial city to the southeast of Shanghai.

From the airplane, Shanghai looked like a complicated computer chip board with many high-rise apartments and skyscrapers. Lots of barges on the Yellow River, which itself was quite brown and yellow. It was amazing to see the density of housing...some of the high-rise buildings are 5-6 blocks long. The poverty is very visible and quite often is very near the fancy, rich buildings. Fascinating two-hour ride filled with bikes, pedal carts and pedestrians.

We met three other MBAs in the hotel lobby in Shanghai. After checking in, we set out for what else, but Pizza Hut--time for some palate cleansing. Split a supreme pizza and pitcher of Pepsi and it cost <$6. Shopped around the stores. Strangely, there are 3-4 different Nike and Adidas stores within the same block. Weird. Got back to the hotel at about 8:20pm and was sitting in the lobby when the bus pulled up with the rest of the Notre Dame MBAs. They looked pretty tired, but it was great to see them. We headed to the restaurant lounge after setting up room assignments and had Chinese beer, Tsing Tao. Lights out at 11pm.