I made it to Shanghai!

My much anticipated trip to Shanghai finally arrived! The 13.5 hr flight from Chicago was surprisingly easy and relatively comfortable. By 4:30 pm Shanghai time, I had made it to my hotel where I met one of the other interns from UofO, Guillaume, who had already arrived. Guillaume and I chose a tiny restaurant across from our hotel for dinner where we ordered 2 of whatever the lady pointed to on the 8.5x11 printed sheet of Chinese words. As Caucasians, we stand out as foreigners and assumed whatever she pointed to was her recommendation for us. After being here several days, it seems to be very common to only know about 50% of what is served to me and I think that's probably a good thing. So much new food to try! Varying levels of English proficiency can be found at work but out on the city streets, it seems that next to no English is understood and most transactions involve a lot of pointing. Even if I try and pronounce a Chinese word from my dictionary I am rarely understood unless I point to the written word in my book. Despite this hinderance, everyone we have met so far, either at work or on the street, is incredibly friendly and I've been impressed with how helpful and patient people are! 

The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind and I seem to be exhausted by 9 or 10 every evening. Work started Tuesday morning at 9am and I was placed in a design studio with one of the other UofO interns named Brad. After a lot of introductions and chatter, we were assigned to design the elevations for a large addition to a 5-star hotel complex that had already been designed and whose program had been expanded. We were shocked to be given three 16-story apartment towers and a large 3-story restaurant, recreation center, and karaoke bar complex that connected the apartment towers to one of the 5-star hotel towers to design. We were given a basic extruded massing to develop. We didn't have computers for the first two days, and also barely any supplies so we sat at a table drawing on trace paper. We were told that afternoon that we were to finalize our design to hand off to a 3D modeling/rendering company who would turn it into pretty pictures to show the client ASAP. Brad and I were again shocked at the pace of this project and the reliance on us to develop such a large design. We spent an additional evening modeling on our computers at the hotel to try and meet their deadline. Thursday we reviewed our design with the project leaders and then went to the rendering company across the street to relay our design ideas for them to render. It is amazing how fast the people at this company can build and render 3D models, and how cheap the service is as well. All of us were contemplating how to hire them to render our studio projects for next year....

In between working on our design assignment, Brad and I were invited by one of the principal architects to tour a new residential complex with him. One of the area's largest development companies was putting on a tour of their latest project which was being built with precast concrete panels. This technique is by no means a new technology but it is uncommon in China and the tour was to show the benefits of this type of construction. Many of the photos from this week are of the construction site. It was really interesting to visit a construction site, especially since manual labor is so cheap here and a great deal of work is still done by hand. I was amazed to see older women dressed in long sleeve silk floral tops digging with shovels. It was over 100 degrees and I couldn't imagine working outside all day. We were given waters and towels to wipe our faces as everyone was very sweaty from the heat. It's also interesting to see the scaffolding which is commonly built from bamboo although less and less anymore because of the risk of fire. The construction site also had numerous cartoon posters displayed giving safety advise, which I found humorous. 

I have only been here four days but have already had so many new experiences and find it hard to describe it all. I still have so much to share; more to come!