HADLEY VOGEL (art history) writes:
Coming home was the hardest part of the trip.
It was only after I came home that the jet lag hit, and the culture shock set in. I was still processing things that we had seen and done days after we had done them. It was such a whirlwind of events that I needed space from Shanghai to collect my thoughts and formulate my own understanding of everything that had been introduced to us. I needed to step back and take a breath.
Prior to the trip I thought that the culture shock would most likely be something I would experience when I first arrived in Shanghai, but this was not the case. Everything felt so surreal and foreign to me that it was as if I were in an amusement park. We had at least one translator around, always, and when we would go to a garden or a temple I was not familiar with the Buddhist customs they practiced so I would stand back and observe. The old city felt especially surreal because it had been refurbished in a traditional architectural style and layout.
Somewhere along the way I got used to not being able to read the signs immediately and instinctively searching for the English subtext, being in a crowded street and not being able to hear what people were shouting at one another (but Xhingyu assured us that all they were shouting was “HI, WHAT CAN I GET FOR YOU?” or some other equally ordinary street-vendor chat), or overhearing gossip in a cafe, not having any clue who was in the popular media, and being totally detached from any form of immediate communication for the better part of the day, and being able to easily afford a cab across town. The list goes on too, but somehow I got used to these things, and now that I’m home I really miss them.
Hadley Vogel is a junior art history major.
