Long Second Day with a Happy Ending

Today started out with the first twinges of isolation since I got here, I tried hailing a cab for about 10 minutes (I found out later it's basically impossible to get a taxi in the morning) and then got lost trying to walk to work... so not a great start. After I showed up sweating bullets and stumbled through some marketing research in the morning my new boss treated our department (the three ladies, Ava, Sasa and Chunyi and myself) to lunch at a Hunan style Chinese restaurant, my first real Chinese meal. Totally different than anything they serve in the US but all outstanding... the highlights were three different types of bamboo cooked in a spicy sauce (kinda taste like mushrooms) and yu, small fried fish you eat whole (very small bones) that are sweet and crunchy. The ladies informed me that not only can I get free Chinese lessons at work they may also pay for my cell phone service (I find out tomorrow.) I ran into Alice, a 24 year old English tutor from southern California (Asian-American), after lunch and she offered to help me buy a cell phone and showed me a bunch of good places to shop in the city... oh, the big pickup was the "Tourist Map" from Dr. Moreton, the senior Medical officer (and the guy who hired me) which is a big, well labeled map of the entire Pudong and Puxi areas.

After work I started wandering towards the shopping mall Sasa had pointed out while we were at lunch and ran into a woman from the finance department at the hospital that I had seen on the tour, Sarah from Pennsylvania (grew up in Beijing and speaks fluent Chinese), and ended up grabbing dinner with her at a sushi restaurant at the mall. After dinner she was kind enough to take me to IKEA where I stocked up on some key things for the apartment that were missing (trash can, broom, utensils, etc.) While we were there Alice texted her and we ended up meeting her at a massage parlor where I got my first taste of "real" Shanghai. We each got a two hour massage, one hour foot, one hour body, for... get this, $11 (not a typo, ELEVEN dollars.) So all in all a pretty great day, but I need to hit the sack cause it turns out the workday here is 8:30 am to 5:30 pm and I need to give myself enough time tomorrow to walk to work, I'm pretty sure I know the way...