First day on the job...

The weather on Monday morning as I woke up for my first day was ridiculous. The remnants of Typhoon Krosa, which absolutely annihilated Taiwan by all accounts, hit Shanghai the night before and stuck around for all of Monday, adding a little bit of adventure to an otherwise unspectacular day.

After some serious debate in my hotel room as to whether it was safe to go outside (it was), I put on my boots and rain jacket and trudged out the door, intent on actually doing something work-like for the first time since I arrived. I pulled my pastel blue EF umbrella out of my slightly darker blue EF man tote as I exited the hotel. Within about 2 minutes it was clear that the flimsy plastic umbrella would be useless against the relentless down pour and rushing wind. Umbrellas, bent inside-out, littered the sidewalks wherever I went for the rest of the day.

I walked the 3-minute walk around the corner to the bus stop, hood up, head down against the elements. My bus ran half as often as the other line that stopped near my hotel, enhancing the remoteness of the area and prolonging my time in the rain. Finally, the bus arrived, and I, along with a larger-than-usual crowd of commuters crammed our way onto the bus.

Riding the bus in Shanghai is one of the more ridiculous activities I’ve partaken in so far. Yes, it’s nice to know how to get where you want to go on a bus, but like many things in China, the buses are too small for their purpose and inefficiently-operated. Another thing that comes to mind is grocery bags. They only come in two sizes – small and extra small – and they try to bag everything you buy, which is both wasteful and annoying. I don’t need a bag for my bottle of water. It’s a bottle of water; I’m going to drink it; now. I don’t need a bag for my garbage can. It’s huge, so your fun-size bag will be useless anyway, and I want to carry stuff home in that garbage can, and I know that if you put it in a grocery bag you’re just going to set it aside and waste that prime carrying space… It’s this kind of thinking at the grocery store cash register that might explain why the buses can be so awful.

First, unless you get a seat on the bus (which you won’t during rush hour unless you get on at the beginning of the line), you are damned to be jammed into the cabin of this vehicle in such a way that the term “fire hazard” becomes a gross understatement. People are wedged shoulder-to-shoulder; the yellow caution zones of the bus have nearly as many people in them as there are in the seats. Second, many buses have two employees on them, one to drive and the other to collect fare and pass out receipts. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen – these people trying to collect fares from the endless horde of passengers. It’s like trying to swim through sea of drying cement. Eventually, you get the baseball game concession effect, where people pass the fare card or money along to the fare collector like a box of Cracker Jacks trying to make its way to the center of the row.

Such was the scene as I rode the bus on Monday. The roads outside were just as crowded as the bus inside. You couldn’t tell by the view – the windows were completely fogged up – but the fact that the bus didn’t move at all for ten minutes at one point was a pretty good clue. That made the already unpleasant ride all the more awesome!

Anyhow, what would otherwise have been a 20 minute trip turned out to be about 35 minutes, and I arrived at the office a few minutes late. Great start to my first day! Well, as it turns out it didn’t matter much. After a 15 minute tour of “Mega Center” I killed the rest of the morning at a computer, which by this point was not as exciting as it had been on Friday during my crisis. A tasty lunch on the company dime carried me into the afternoon.

The PM hours were a little bit more productive. Lucy Lu from HR arranged for me to meet with Anson, a real estate agent who does a lot of house-hunting for EF employees. We talked for a half an hour or so. I gave him my specs and price range for an apartment. Ideally, I wanted something near my branch office on the west side of town, over at Zhongshan Park. Anson said he’d get back to me on Tuesday…he didn’t.

And thus would begin my made adventure for the week: house-hunting.


Vocabularly: 上班，"shang ban," to go to work.

Music to move you: "Blame it on the Rain" by Milli Vanilli