second story

Second story:


This one is pretty awesome. So as one may assume, nothing about living in Shanghai is easy. From the language barrier to the bathroom situations, things are just very different. Here is the first incident that proved that life in the big city can be a little rough sometimes. This past week my roomie Jami was having some problems with her Mac computer. The night that the problems started we decided that it was probably best to take it down to the new Apple store downtown Shanghai. Unfortunately her computer problems coincided with the occurrence of a serious typhoon. A typhoon is not your typical rain storm, the rain comes down in literally sheets if rain, umbrellas and rain jackets will not help keep you dry in that kind of weather disaster. So we throw on some sweats and decided to hit the road. Since it was kinda late in the evening both of us were just wearing sweats, I had on some leggings, a mens Hanes t-shirt and some vintage old navy flip flops, Jami was wearing some athletic short, a t-shirt and some sandals as well.
We head to the end of our street to hail a cab since we didn’t know what metro line would take us downtown. We had written down the address and Jami had the taxi help line saved in her phone. After about 20 minutes of trying to flag down a taxi, turns out it is IMPOSSIBLE to get a taxi during a typhoon, a westerner tells his cab to pull over to us. He rolls down his window and tell us that he is only going about 2 blocks up and we can jump in the taxi and take it when he gets out. We were elated! He was pretty much our guardian angel of the night. After he asked us where we were heading we found out that the address we had gotten off the internet was way too broad and that the taxi driver didn’t know where it was (he spoke fluent Chinese). So he graciously jumped on his blackberry and figured out the correct address for the taxi driver to take us to. Once our taxi was on the way to the Apple store we thought it would be smooth sailing from there. Yeah…didn’t turn out that way. The taxi driver dropped us off just a little ways down the street from the store.
As we walked up to the mall that it was in our jaws totally dropped. There in front of us stood the mall that housed ALL of the top designer’s stores. We are talking Dior, Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vitton, the list goes on and on. Plus it was attached to the Ritz Carlton so as we are walking through the parking lot there were Bentleys, Rolls Royce’s and Ferraris parked in the parking lot. So we stroll on into this upscale mall looking totally classy drenched head to toe and squeaking as we walk the pristine hallways of this marble palace. People are staring at us as we walk with WIDE eyes in amazement of the gorgeous clothes and the smell of luxury(the air really did smell wonderful in there, it was definitely the cleanest air I have experienced in Shanghai).
After walking around for a few minutes we ask the help desk where we can find the Apple store. She told us to go out a set of doors and it would be right outside. So we followed her directions and stepped outside to find this AMAZING structure with the Apple logo floating in the middle. The store entrance is a massive glass cylinder with a spiral staircase that leads into the underground store. The store is also located in a spot where if you look up you can see some of the most amazing skyscrapers in Shanghai. So we walk across the courtyard towards the store. We are walking with our arms interlinked so we didn’t slip with our eyes glued to the skyline and the crazy Apple structure. Well, it turns out that the glass structure was surrounded by a mote of water that was not blocked off. So as we walk we don’t even see this awesome little mote and tumble right into it!! I seriously doubled over with laughter! As if we weren’t wet enough already, now we just fell right into the Apple mote! All of the guards around the building were laughing at us and were in laughing hysterically at ourselves.
After gathering ourselves we venture down the glass spiral stairs into the apple store. We drop off her computer and have to leave it there for a few days while it gets repaired. So we head back outside to find that it is now raining even harder than before. And when we get to the road we find that the streets are totally flooded. We are waking in puddles seriously up to our shins on the street as we try again to get a taxi. This time we wonder up and down the busy street for about 45 minutes. After slipping a few times on the pavement and chasing flip flops down the streams of a busy Shanghai street, we decide that it is time to step in somewhere and call a friend to help us out. But once we got our cell phones out we discovered that Jami’s cell phone was dying and mine wouldn’t make any outgoing calls and when I tried to text it kept switching to Arabic as the input language! We were able to make a quick phone call to our friend Jake who called our program director who tells him to tell us that when we were in the mall we were literally standing on top of a metro station that could take us home so now we had to treck back to the mall where we stuck out like a sore thumb and find this stinking metro station. Finally we found it and were able to navigate our way home where we actually had to wring the water out of our clothes.
In the end this was the craziest story I have to date about traveling and surviving in a different country. Luckily Jami and I both have a good sense of humor and an optimistic personality. I couldn’t have asked for a better person to be stuck in a typhoon with, we seriously were laughing the entire time. And I wouldn’t take back that situation for anything. It will remain one of my funniest memories FOREVER!