Hit The Books, Hit The Road: A Travelling Student

The first time I stepped onto the Shanghai Metro platform at Jiangsu Road station on my first day of volunteer work, I was surprised at how organised, efficient, quiet and ‘un-like London’ it was. In a city with a population of over 23.9 million people, it’s a common assumption that the inner-city public transport would be a nightmare to navigate. Not in China’s most populous city. Although I had learnt some Mandarin Chinese at school, I still found myself too shy to ask the policeman guarding the entry to the underground about my malfunctioning ticket. Not a problem. Officials smiled at the helpless foreigner, unable to work the ticket machine on her first day, during her first time, to Shanghai, China.
My placement at a small school for children with autism in the centre of Shanghai lasted two weeks, during which I learnt about the daily lives of locals who worked, lived and breathed five thousand, seven hundred and eleven miles away from my home in London, United Kingdom. From my early rise in the morning when the sun had not quite seeped through the climbing skyscrapers of a city experiencing an economic boom, to the hurry home in the orange-tinted background of a sunset reflected off the Huangpu river after a 8-hour workday, I became almost a local myself.

My co-workers welcomed me warmly. I believe anyone working for an altruistic cause will always have the kindest heart. They did not speak very much English, and I didn’t speak very much Mandarin Chinese, but our strong mutual interest in helping children in need made me feel at ease in this new, foreign work environment. Thanks to them, I had my first ‘leng mian’ (cold noodles) with soy sauce, fresh seaweed and spicy chilli sauce, as well as a Chinese breakfast egg and vegetable pancake made every morning by a family-run food stand. I made my first long distance friend during this trip: Liu Yi, a college graduate with a vibrant personality who insisted on showing me Shanghai’s youth scene. The immense Chinese ‘malls’ with breath-taking modern architecture was a perfect representation of traditional Chinese culture merging with the up-and-coming modernisation of Shanghai.

The first time I travelled to China will not be the last time. The city has given me such a good impression that I actively plan to return to volunteer at the same school. Once a person can travel across the world, alone, and work in a new environment, that person becomes limitless like the Shanghai heights themselves.