Shanghai | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

On walking to one of the cafeterias we passed several booths. I was asked to take part in a survey. At least that’s what I understood. I thought why not, filled in my name, email address and telephone number and they promised to contact me. I asked what we’d do then and they said something about an interview and that they’d be happy if I’d join them. Join what? Seems to be some kind of student council. I’m not sure. But I have no intention to join.

We walked on and found more clubs in front of the cafeteria:

I left my number at a dance club. Thought that could be interesting.

Next day:

My landlady’s grandson just came in, crashed his remote control car against my water bottle and left. Perhaps I should start to lock my room.

Had to move again. Now I’m staying here until at least the beginning of July. Living out of the suitcase finally has an end.

I wanted to take a picture of the McDonalds menu but the lady tore it away quickly. No idea why. Particularly because she handed it back to let us order. And then they gave us the take-away menu. I could have taken a picture of that…

At least I could try the Banana Pie that’s advertised all over the city:

I don’t have to have it again. Too sweet filling and a strange sour crust.

This was never intended to become a food blog and I promise to stop. But finding something to eat isn’t that easy and the things you get may not be what you expect them to be. So, another restaurant that seemed a little bit more exalted than the ones before:

It doesn’t only look like war, we also have the sound. There are fireworks about every other day. And they’re only meters away from the houses. I filmed this one yesterday (and it took ages to upload it). A Chinese girl told me that there’ll be a marriage the next day.

Yesterday we met a German guy with his nice Chinese girlfriend. She really seemed to like him. He will fly back to his German girlfriend in three or four days and thought if he won’t betray her now he’ll never do. And the poor little Chinese girl’s heart will be broken. That takes the stuffing out of me.

Because you also pay when someone calls you, you’re unreachable if there’s no more money on the card. So I bought an update right away. It wasn’t that easy to tell the man what I wanted. We had no common language. As most Chinese he spoke neither English nor German and my Chinese is hardly existent. I ended up with this:

And had no idea what to do. I called 13800138000 and switched to English but I still needed a “user pin number” which I don’t have. One hour after I had started – and only due to Chinese help – I finally had 48 Yuan on the card. I’d like to know where the missing 2 Yuan went.

I really like it here. Why don’t we have a campus like that in Munich?

Someone said that there would be vegetarian food at the Muslim cafeteria so we tried to find it. Without success. The thing is that you can’t just ask someone because hardly anyone speaks English and our Chinese is horrible. I finally had to take rice with vinegar and pepper things… I’ve never eaten so little since being in China. The day before yesterday I bought a whole bunch of candy but it also doesn’t taste. Ah mei.

When we left the cafeteria we found out that the Muslim one was right next to it: