Penniless in the City

Today's weather:  High = 22 Low = 16

Sunny

 

As anyone would tell you, Shanghai is not a city where you want to be penniless in.  Yet due to a nasty combination of a one-month delay in the school paying out salaries and a whole glob of typical start-up expenses in September and October, then penniless is exactly my situation until next week when we get paid!

 

Basically what it means is that I survive on free cafeteria food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  The food in the school's caf is really disgusting, and most teachers now refuse to eat there.  However, I end up taking second helpings for lunch then taking it away to eat for dinner later on.

 

As for transport, the plan is to make sparing use of the remaining gas in the motorcycle tank, and combine this with taking the subway.

 

Fortunately there are no other expenses as this month has been real busy.  It's a simple case of go to work, teach classes, and go back home to hunker down on my masters degree.  Which, that reminds me, the final project is due within a week.

 

Regretably I had to borrow about 9000 RMB total from various friends, who were nice enough to lend the money out back at the beginning of this month.  This amounted to being able to cover the housing rent, deposit, and other untold start-up costs.  Minusing out all the expenses, I was left to survive on a few hundred RMB for my own daily life and will continue this for another week.

 

Once we finally get paid, the entire salary will get dumped onto my credit card, then will pay back the loans from friends.  In about 3 months, my financial situation will return to normal.  

 

While Shanghai is an expensive city for sure, it could be worse --- I could end up back in Vancouver or elsewhere in Canada.  Given a situation like that, at this point I would be living on the street as I simply couldn't afford the high costs back home.