Travel

There is something comforting in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. To the traveler, it is a low-mess package of protein, fat and sugar, with that perfect sweet-salty combination that, I think, improves if the sandwich has been sitting around for a few hours. This was what I was thinking as I slowly ate my PBJ, prepared some undeterminable amount of time before in my kitchen, on the flight from Chicago to Shanghai. With the sandwich, I said goodbye to the last shred of familiarity I can count on for the next five months. I took to bringing food with me on long flights once I discovered that my stomach does not react well to the combination of jet-lag, half-sleep and reconstituted scrambled eggs. The somewhat battered PBJ has become a ritual I count on.

I met up with a couple of my classmates at the gate in Newark Airport Tuesday morning, and we joined several others at Chicago O’Hare before boarding the plane. In Shanghai, after retrieving our bags and changing some dollars into yuan, one contingent of our group set about finding the (somewhat hidden) bus terminal. We were the last to arrive, and it fell to me to negotiate buying our 6 tickets (apparently constant aggression is needed to get most services: lines don’t exist in China) while everyone else put their bags in the bus’ storage area. By the time I’d distributed the tickets, there was of course no room left in the storage compartment, which resulted in a somewhat comical attempt by me to maneuver a suitcase slightly wider than the aisle to the back of the bus where there was an empty seat, park the suitcase in the aisle, climb over it and trip over the man sitting between me and the window seat, and pack myself in with a small duffel between my feet and a backpack on my lap. Three hours later I regained feeling in my legs, just in time to hail a taxi to my new home, Zhejiang University of Technology. I arrived around 7:00 PM local time, approximately 26 hours after I left my house, with just about enough energy to meet my roommate (more on her later), shower, and kill time until a decent hour to go to sleep.