2/1/09

6:30

My concrete mattress worked surprisingly well. Softness, it seems, is a material quality the Chinese have failed to achieve. My pillow, blanket and mattress are about 90% sand, 5% steel, 5% cotton. No big deal. I was so tired from travellimg I slept like a rock – a rock that wakes up every two hours. We’re supposed to be down in the lobby at 8 but I woke up early to watch tv, shower, and figure out how to connect to the internet – no luck with the internets…The communal bathrooms have a summer camp quality to them. They get the job done while making you want to spend as little time as possible showering.

 

3:01

We took a “tour” of the BeiWai campus at 8:30 this morning. We simply walked around in the cold for about an hour until we got to a stereotypical looking Chinese neighborhood. We were told to order either baozi or zhaozi. From what I could tell jiaozi was a boiled dumpling and baozi was a semi-fried one. Great breakfast food. It was cheap too. 80 cents for 8 dumpligs. They were served in a plastic bag and eaten with chopsticks. I have had two meals here and used disposable chopsticks twice. It’s mindblowing how many chopsticks this country must make/use.

 

After some warm food in our bellies we went onto a shangdian, or grocery store. Shopping in China is very odd so far. Guards, dressed in full Soviet style uniform prevent you from going backward through the maze-like store. I tried to return to the ATM at the front to get cash but was halted by the guard and told to walk through the whole store to return. After my ATM debacle I bought a note pad at the beginning of the store. I tried to proceed to the laundry detergent but a clerk stopped me and made me pay at her counter for the notebook. So I was walking around with one paid for notebook for the rest of the shopping experience. I picked up some laundry detergent, toilet paper and snacks and paid for all of them at the end of the store…except for my notebook..which I had already paid for. I don’t know why they do it like that. Hopefully I’ll find out why. We ate lunch at a restaurant. Ordinarily I’d call it a Chinese restaurant…but they’re all kinda Chinese restaurants here.

 

We had a few seminar-like things this afternoon lead by Jeremiah Jeffe and Rob Blinn, a visiting scholar or Beijing and an American doctor. We found out Mao had built an underground city beneath Beijing in the hopes it would save the city during a nuclear war.

 

The IES staff got us pizza and we had ourselves a little “mixer”. Forced socializing is not my forte, but I survived. I thought everyone was getting a long really well (making small talk, finding stuff out about eachother) without having mixers. We had been walking around and exploring together so much that we basically knew everyone’s names and where they came from already.

 

Alright, back to sleep on my table/bed. I think I’ll go get better bedding tomorrow.

 

Word of the day: ????? Let me get back to you….