Shanghai VS.

It’s a common question I get. I’ve been fielding the question since I first became dead set on moving to Shanghai while still a university student. Let me back track a little though since this is only post number 1.

I graduated from University this past April with a hefty BA, majored in political science and international development studies. Now anyone out there with a BA knows what I’m talking about when I say the BA doesn’t exactly set you on a career path (unless of course you want to drown yourself in the law). This isn’t to say the BAs not useful or it wasn’t enjoyable, but to me the sole advantage of the BA is such: It allows you to dick around for a little while. Its every liberal arts graduates dream to go abroad. Some have noble dreams. They are going to change the world. They are going to volunteer. They are going to put their knowledge of grassroots organizations to use in the field… and I applaud them. My dreams were never so noble. Not to say that I’ve never thought about doing such things, but ultimately I never really entertained it seriously. For me my post BA dreams were a little different.

It happened suddenly maybe over night, maybe in an instant. But at some point I knew I was moving to Shanghai. I think I may have seen a show on the discovery channel or what not about Shanghai or maybe I made that up, I don’t know anymore. Shanghai looked big, bright, exciting. It was both new and old. It was communist, but ahh, so capitalist. I was sold. Either way at some point I had an answer to the dreadful question of what are you doing next year. I was going to Shanghai. The follow up question of “what for?” was a little more difficult to answer. Then, in a stroke of genius (I’m fairly modest, really) I came up with “to make shit happen”.

So to summarize for you visual learners out there: If you take a look at this pretty money map in the middle of the page which shows tourist destinations. I have chosen the bright green while my classmates are part of the 0.1 percent who chose the red. (I ve been trying to find a more detailed version of that map but have failed, if anyone has got it let me know.)

Anyways I had/have no real set plans. I thought about working a real job for a while, even did it for all of 3 days. The life of an ESL teacher was too appealing to resist. Little work, enough pay. I’ve always wanted to start one of these blogs, you know get some web 2.0 up in my face. So here we go, I hope you (who for now probably consists of my mother) enjoy. I’m going to try to do some in depth comparison stuff between Shanghai (or whatever other city I happen to be in) and everything else (I’ll explain more in another post), because well, even though Shanghai is a huge metropolitan city, its always just a little off, a little different, a little exciting. Amongst my serious journalistic endeavors I will also just talk some shit, sports, music, or what not. As always, keep it real people.

Tags: Adventure, China, Life, Shanghai, Travel, Work

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.