My foray into the depths of Shanghai began, innocently enough, at a summer opportunities fair in the Gutman Library. It was the winter of my freshman year, and among the Wall Street firms and nonprofit organizations giving their best summer sales pitches, one option stood out: a summer program that paired 30 international college students with seven-week internships in Shanghai. Perhaps I wanted an escape.
Perhaps it was the picture of the Shanghai skyline that did it. But for whatever reason, I applied for the program. A getaway, I reasoned, could never hurt. We returned from nights out to find stray cats wandering the hallways.
Pimps offered us prostitutes in the lobby, and, when we declined, pestered us through the elevator and up to our rooms. My coworker Juan had some linen stolen from his hotel room, with the staff reception being no help. And on one occasion, as previously alluded to, we found shit lying in the hallway. After living in the city for a few weeks, I discovered the only rule in Shanghai: There are no rules.
In Shanghai, you can trample children on the subway if a seat opens up. In my head, I had an understanding of how the rest of my time in Shanghai would play out. Maybe I had seen too many movies, but I figured this would be one of those stories where the protagonist finds himself in an undesirable situation and, only after removing some negative aspect of his personality, begins to enjoy it.
Yet as the days dragged on, this possibility began to disappear. Almost on a whim, a few friends and I bought tickets to Beijing, about miles from Shanghai, and decided to spend a weekend there. We were unprepared and departed without a plan, treating our voyage not as a visit to Beijing, but rather a three-day respite from Shanghai.
