This aisle is brought to you by noodles!

Since we haven't done too much this week, I thought I'd catch everyone up on our move to our second campus. Since the Chinese Fall semester doesn't end until Chinese New Year, our stay in the city was only for 6 weeks. A week or so after New Years, the 40 of us made the move out to a suburb of Shanghai, about 45 minutes away to start taking our engineering courses at SJTU's main campus at Minhang. I say the 40 of us moved, but actually it was more like 25-30 of us moving 40 of us, since some people had already left on their spring break trips (we had 2 weeks off from classes due to the New Year, so some people took longer trips than others. Those that left early found someone willing to take their stuff over to the other campus in exchange for dinner or another agreement. So, the 30ish of us loaded up 2 buses with all of our luggage and moved to the international student dorms on Minhang's campus. We live on the 3rd floor of the building and there are no elevators, so we all got a great workout carrying 50ish pound bags up the stairs. I personally made about 4 or 5 trips as I moved my roommate in too. The dorms are much nicer than we expected, about the size of an American dorm, but we have less stuff with us so it seems bigger. We have 2 beds that face each other, two desks, a TV, two sets of closets with more space than we could possibly fill on this trip, and our own bathroom. 

One of the beds in the room by the window. Outside the window is a clothes rack for drying our laundry.

TV in between the desks.

One desk set up.

Our huge closets.

Although the dorms are nice, we did encounter some extra expenses that we weren't expecting to have. We have to pay 2 yuan if we want our shower to be hot (less than 50 cents, a small price to pay for not freezing every day), and we have to pay for our own utilities which includes the heater to warm up the rooms when it gets cold. Needless to say, people are putting on more layers until it warms up outside because they don't want to pay for anything extra. Other than that, the campus has been great so far. We live right by the track, so me and Joe have started running for half an hour every day and we are also close to the biggest cafeteria on campus, where we eat 2 meals a day for around a dollar each!

On Monday we started classes on this campus. Most of us are only taking 2, although a few are taking 3. They are all actual Mechanical Engineering classes now instead of classes about China, so they seem more serious. We are certainly living the life though as we only have class for 1 hour and 40 minutes Mondays and Tuesdays and for 3 hours on Thursdays, giving us Wednesdays and Fridays off and most of the other days off too. We have some more homework now than we did before, but we definitely have more free time than we all did back at Purdue- next semester will be a struggle I'm sure. Our teachers are very good so far and speak great English. In one of our classes, we are joined by Chinese students, so we finally have an advantage in that the notes are in English and they are still working on their English. 

Right by campus is a huge supermarket where we went to go and buy our towels and other things for our rooms when we got here. This is Joe's favorite aisle just because it is absurd. All of these boxes and packages you see are different flavors of ramen noodles, with their very own aisle in the store. As you can see, they're pretty popular here. 

This aisle brought to you by noodles.