Woke up early around 7:30 AM. Left our bags at the hostel. Wandered around to the south and regular train stations. Want to go to Hangzhou but it would take too long (1h 45m each way) so we went to get some breakfast at KFC (not so great!) in the gourmet section. Shanghai subway is good about English but most people are not. Everything is under construction and the streets are sometimes blocked. Crossing streets is like playing Frogger. We went to the Google Shanghai office which was pretty nice and saw a meeting scheduled by Kai Fu Lee. The food is definitely not the same as Santa Monica. We wandered around the shopping areas on Nanjing Road and down towards the waterfront (which was blocked off by signs). Many people stopped me to try to sell me things. We then took the train to Suzhou, Li’s ancestral hometown, with Nancy and Irene. Nancy is Li’s Stanford friend and Irene is her roommate at their volunteer program teaching migrant children English. Irene is from the suburbs of Chicago and is now going to the Art Institute of Chicago. She wants to be a teacher. She’s never visited California before, but now she definitely has a reason to come! Attendants on the train sold popcorn, which was actually sweeter than kettlecorn. Once in Suzhou, we met Li’s dad and uncle and his cousin Jia Ming and his girlfriend. Jia Ming would later travel with us for about a week. His English was okay but not great but his Chinese got us through many tough spots that Li and I would’ve been lost in. After putting our stuff down in Li’s place (his name is on the lease), we went to a banquet dinner in a private room. After that, we went to a newer part of town where there was a nice bridge and a street view with many, many flashy neon lights. The streets are very American (wide, unlike Europe) but there’s not a whole lot of car traffic yet. No one obeys the law and seat belts are not the custom at all. We were actually told to take ours off! We then returned to Li’s place. It’s a two bedroom apartment which is entirely new. In fact, we were the first people to stay there for the night! It’s nicer in a lot of ways than my place in Santa Monica … except smell dispersal in the bathroom isn’t great and you have to supply the toilet manually with water. The bed was also quite hard so I ended up sleeping on a couch cushion. I eventually realized that this was a common feature of beds in China.