Finding an Apartment!

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Life in Shanghai

This week, my second full week living in Shanghai was mostly a combination of getting my life in China setup as well as doing research. On Monday, I went with my friend (and fellow SJTU postdoc) Haojie and got a phone plan. Phone plans are significantly cheaper in China, compared to the US! For 68 RMB/moth (or ~$10), I get 10GB’s and 50 minutes of actual callign a month. However, with wechat calling and Facetime, I really don’t need more than that!

I spent Thursday and Friday visiting potential apartment with an apartment agent. While I’m not going to show pictures of all the apartments that I visited (there were more than 10), most were in the area between Xuhui and Xintiandi, which is close to the heart of downtown Shanghai. Despite being an ~ 1 hour commute from the SJTU Minhang campus, I am taking the plunge to really get to know and experience Shanghai!

The apartments I visited were a mix of furnished loft style and studio apartments. I ultimately selected a lovely loft (or really in this case 2 floor) apartment near Xintiandi (I’ll post some pictures once I’m settled). By comparison to many of the other apartments I visited, I selected it because it was spacious and even had a shower that I could stand up in! While Xintiandi is more expensive than Minhang (where the university is), the apartment I selected was within my budget. I also think the social experience of living in the city will be an exciting opportunity!

To travel between apartments, I rode on the back of my rental agent’s motor scooter. Motor scooters are an incredibly common mode of transportation in Shanghai. This was both an exhilarating and terrifying experience. Basically nobody seems to be paying attention, scooters are cutting in and out of traffic, while mostly driving on the edges of the roads and sometimes the sidewalks, but to my relief, nobody seems to get in accidents (there are close calls). While I’m glad I’ve done it once, I don’t think riding a motor scooter will be happening much in my near future.

Since I found an apartment, I spent Saturday afternoon exploring the surrounding area. About a 5 minute walk from where I live is the gorgeous Fuxin Park, shown below.

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While not huge, this may be a nice place for me to go running on the weekends (I really want to get back to running regularly!). It’s really nice having so much green space nearby!

In addition to Fuxin Park, there’s a lot of shopping areas (and malls) in Xintiandi. They’re mostly full of western stores/restaurants (including things like Tesla, Shake Shack, and Godiva). There were also some cool sculptures and advertistements that I thought you’ld love to see!

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Additionally, while exploring apartments, I walked by the Xuhui campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It’s where I’ll get the shuttle to the Minhang campus every day. For those of you wondering if those lions do look familiar, they do! The lion on the left is the lion in my Facebook profile picture!

Exploring different parts of Shanghai while looking at apartments allowed me to see a lot of really cool different parts of the city as well! While Shanghai is huge, in small chunks, it is definitely walk able and I look forward to exploring it more and keeping my eye out for different cool things!

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Despite all the time I spent searching for an apartment, I did get some Astronomy research done. Mostly, I prepared for a presentation at the latest DES clusters telecon. My first of many midnight (or late night/early morning) telecons! This was the result of making great progress on my first DES project! Hopefully, once I’m settled into my apartment, I’ll be able to hit the ground running on both my DES and upcoming DESI research!

Food in Shanghai

Since I’m still living in a hotel (until tomorrow), most of my meals have been a mixture of the SJTU dining halls (where a lot of the faculty/postdocs eat lunch) as well as some lovely dinners at vegan/vegetarian restaurants. I’ve really enjoyed experiencing so many different kinds of Chinese vegetarian foods and look forward to trying more! Most of the menus are in english, so I have some sense of what I’m ordering, but it’s fun to try new food! Here are few selections from this week. Not shown is a chrysanthemum tea, which was very interesting.

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As many of you know, I love pandas! So, I couldn’t resist getting the panda shortbread cookies!

Jewish Life in Shanghai

Finding the Jewish community in Shanghai has been one of my best parts (other than the great veggie food!) of my experience in Shanghai so far! This Friday, I joined the Moishe House in Shanghai for Shabbat in the Sukkah, a celebration of both Sukkot and Shabbat. As I’ve said before, being in a foreign city, it’s great to slip into the comforts of a Jewish community. It’s also been really nice meeting other young professionals most of whom are in Shanghai either to teach, be students, or work in business/technology.

I hope that you enjoyed hearing about my second week in Shanghai, while not filled with as many adventures as week 1, I think that the life progress I made this week, will go a long way to helping my life reach a nice balance. Also, as I said in my last entry, I’d love to hear from you, so if you have any questions or comments, please comment on the blog!

Until next week!

In peace,
Jesse