It seems that my friends in Shanghai are a bit altruistic, kind, and helpful. Several such friends invited me to visit a local orphanage one weekend, and I agreed to go. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, as I’d not been to any orphanages in any country, and I haven’t hardly been anywhere in China, but it was an experience I’ll never forget.

We were all to meet up a bit before 10am to get on a bus which would take us there. My wife and I left a bit early so we could stop by the market to pick up a picnic lunch, and to purchase the kids a few items we were told they needed. At the market nearly the entire crew was there doing the same thing.

Soon thereafter we loaded the bus and were on our way. In the three months that I’ve lived in Shanghai, I’ve never ventured outside the city. I live in Pudong, which could easily be considered a suburb of the main city of Shanghai, but it is a suburb with about one million residents which is about half a million more people than live in any other city in which I have lived. Which is to say it is huge, and urban, and not at all the countryside.

The orphanage was located a bit outside of Pudong and soon we left the skyscrapers and rows of 18-story apartment buildings behind. We actually began to see patches of green grass and plots of farmland, something I haven’t seen since I set foot on Chinese soil. My wife mentioned that this must be where a lot of the street vendors who we see selling vegetables and things at night come from, and I supposed she was right.

Scattered about the small plots of farms were these large, several story high buildings that reminded me of the pictures you see of old Southern plantations. Except where real plantation mansions sit on enormous acres of land, these were lifted into the sky much more often, overseeing much smaller plots of land. They looked ancient, and dirty, and ruined. Like they were built decades ago, and then left to fend for themselves.

The bus continued to rumble along the narrow and bumpy road. We crossed through several villages and made too many turns to count and slowly realized we were lost. Actually this realization wasn’t so slow as the bus turned a corner and suddenly there was no more road. We sat amidst a series of industrial looking buildings all looking befuddled as to what to do.