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Traveling Psychologist Series 2 - Shanghai Days and Nights

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osamamalik

Coming to the most cosmopolitan city in the world has its advantages and disadvantages. To understand Shanghai, you have to appreciate its size, 6,000 square meters, approximately four times the size of London and its costs, the sixth most expensive city in the world. Having said this in Western calculations, daily life is still cheap compared to living in England. However, this essay is not about Shanghai directly, nor about its geography and economy, but about its feel, its sounds and its senses. In other words, what is it like to come to Shanghai and live every day in a city that, like New York, never sleeps?

When I first arrived in Shanghai, relatives of my Chinese girlfriend put me up in a small apartment near the Shanghai Indoor Stadium. They were about to move out however, and before long, I found myself helping them move into her new apartment closer to her husband's business area. In another two months I had moved again, this time to my own apartment at an international school where I was working to teach English, some science and psychology.

This school was located in the new Pudong area, where most Westerners who work for big companies like General Electric and General Motors rent expensive houses and villas on closed and guarded land. For whatever reason, the Chinese fear for Westerners and always insist on almost locking them up when they are not at work. He had spent three years in China, first in JinHua (Zhejiang Provence) and then two years in Wuhan, known as the cauldron of China because it is so hot there. So when I came to Shanghai, I was not a new foreigner in China, but generally a veteran.

However, Shanghai is not like the rest of China, it is a megacity and is full of foreign citizens, with embassies to serve them and restaurants to please all tastes of the country where it comes from. So at first I was really disappointed as before in JinHua and Wuhan. It had been special, people were interested in you, they invited you to places and their homes, but in Shanghai you are one of many and that is why you lose that feeling of being different. quickly. I didn't like Pudong, it's like living in a cemetery, there are times when you can walk to the local Carr Four supermarket (French) and hardly see another person except for some American teenagers running on skateboards and mountain bikes, well outside of it. price range of most เที่ยวตามซีรีย์.

In a word to me, it was boring and felt like a suburban desert rather than overcrowded and bustling China. At the end of the six months, my contract with the school ended and I accepted a position with a Chinese psychology company as its clinical director. It was an easy job since I only worked one day a week so a Chinese would have to work two months. They wanted my "name" more than I did, so I started using my spare time to teach business English to Chinese companies and started my own business providing Western-style advice to local people. This also meant another move to my current apartment at Nanpu Bridge on the Puxi side.

I was finally back in real China! Every night the streets are full of merchants selling dubious food, trinkets, clothes, flowers and an abundance of other merchandise and of course cheap DVDs !! (Piracy here is like no other country: everything is copied and sold openly on the street.) From 6 p.m. Until 11 p.m., the street outside my apartment is full of people, walking, shouting and buying / selling almost anything you can think of. Sometimes this can be a bit annoying trying to pass them to the entrance of your apartment block and just going thirty meters to the Chinese supermarket is a test of dodging the motorcycles that insist they have the right of way on the sidewalk. I never stray out of the way, but I feign deafness and thwarted his progress as much as possible.

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