“If three of us travel together, I shall find two teachers.”

Confucius

One of my favorite people on the planet is my friend Sara, who has a more of a lust for life than anyone I’ve ever met. So when she moved to Shanghai to be a teacher with her soon-to-be husband Greg, it was a perfect excuse to go to China.

After a 14-hour flight where the woman next to me put her feet at eye-level on the chair in front of her and slept on my arm, I landed late in Beijing, which meant I missed my connection to Shanghai. It was late at night and, not speaking the language, I was lost on how to request a free hotel room from the airline, standing there confused among all of other passengers yelling at the man behind the counter as he decided who would and would not receive the magic piece of paper that meant you got a room. Luckily, a mother surrounded by her children adopted me for a little bit and argued for me to be given one of the rooms. Unluckily, it was at a terrible hotel where I had to share a room with a stranger (from what I understood, he had been in the U.S. visiting his girlfriend who went to Purdue).

Finally, the next day I made it to Shanghai. One of the best parts of the trip was that Sara and Greg still had to teach during the day, so I could wander around the city solo during the day and discover it myself, and then meet up with them at night to talk about what I did and catch up with them. I had so many great moments wandering around the city, which is both old and almost shockingly modern at the same time. I bought pork floss buns and coffee and watched the seniors dance in the park. I wandered into a modern art museum and got lost in a video piece of two black and white swordsman fighting in a shallow pool. I took a dumpling tour and ate more dumplings and jian bing than I thought possible in such a short period of time.

Sadly at one point the three of us came down with some food poisoning and splayed out on mattresses in their apartment watching documentaries, but even that was fun in its own way. We also smoked hookah in a restaurant on the water with colorful lanterns hanging around us, haggled with vendors in street markets, wandered around the artsy alleyways of Tianzifang at night, and took a day trip out to the ancient pagodas and waterways of Hangzhou.

On my way back I had one last adventure: a long morning layover in Beijing meant I could get to the Great Wall right when it opened. After taking a chilly chairlift up to the wall, I had it to myself for the morning, wandering up and down the stairways, taking photos and watching the early sun come up.