1/31/09

What a day.

 

After about 24 hours of travel I am finally in Beijing. What a weird place. It’s a strange mix of high tech LED displays and run down east European housing. Where should I start? I guess where I left off last entry.

 

My plane arrived at gate 96 as I was munching down on my $8.68 Whopper and fries at the Burger King in the airport. I hurried over to board but they were still preparing the plane, refueling, re-fooding, loading cargo etc. A strange liquid started pouring out of the bottom of the plane where a tube was inserted. No one seemed to notice this for about 5 minutes after a rather large puddle had accumulated below. I could only assume (hope) it was water. After boarding I noticed only 3 screens in front of me, which meant no choice of in flight movies, and perhaps no choice of language to watch, said movies. I dozed in and out of sleep the whole 11.5 hour journey. I had three seats to myself so sleeping was quite comfortable. Occasionally I would wake to food or drink being served. The second meal was a choice of either rice or noodles. The steward asked in thick a thick Chinese accent “Rice or noodles”. I was about to respond to him in Chinese but I realized I didn’t know the word for noodles, so I chose rice. I didn’t particularly care which one I received, I just wanted to use some Chinese before landing.

 

Beijing airport looks just like any major airport; it reminded me of Heathrow airport…before you get to the hellhole that is Heathrow baggage claim. The whole airport seemed shiny and new (later I found out it basically was). There was all the usual suspects: Coach, Burberry, Starbucks, KFC.(wtf?).

 

On line for customs the guy behind me asked if I went to school in Austin – he read my tag. I turned around to the 6 foot something black guy I had seen waiting in my terminal all day. It turns out he played basketball for UT, a Nigerian team, a Korean team and at one point Utah Jazz. He now plays for some team in China. He had a broken arm but was under contract so he had to return to China. As he was telling me this story on our way to baggage claim, it reminded me of a book my dad gave me about a guy who plays college basketball and bums around on foreign teams and the NBA. I told Gabe, my first friend in China, about the book and he said “Oh yeah, that’s my boy. Paul Shirley. Good guy. I just spoke to him the other day…”

 

How….weird…is…that….

 

I got here at night, but I can already sense how polluted it is. The streetlights make some roads look like Victorian London. If I hadn’t heard the stories, or lungs I might have thought it was just fog. Driving is an adventure to say the least. Our driver was pretty conservative, but some taxis haul around like it’s Mario Kart. I want to save this sort of discussion for later entries, when I have a more detailed picture of driving etiquette or lack thereof.

 

OK. I’m tired. Everyone is really friendly, Chinese and American students alike. We’ll see what happens…

 

Word of the day

Seat belt – anquandai - 安全带

Departure 1/30/09

So I’m sitting in the San Fransisco airport. It’s 1:12pm and I’ve been here since 8:45am local time. My flight is supposed to take off sometime slightly before 2:00pm . I’ve been up for 10 hours so far and I haven’t even left the U.S.

 

Things I’ve learned so far:

1)    I know no practical Chinese.

2)    When in doubt, do what others do.

3)    Dyson make the best hand dryers ever.

 

This wing of the airport is (no surprise) the Asian International section. All announcements are either in Japanese, Chinese, or English  (in descending order of frequency). This is going to be really tough. Signs have still all been in English, so I easily found my gate. Plus it was written on my ticket.

 

The lady behind the desk made an announcement, in Chinese, a few minutes ago and slowly people started making their way to the desk to talk to her. I followed. I pretended to listen to her  as if I understood a single word she said. It was just to let me know our flight had been delayed 2 hours. Sweet….

 

The hand dryers in the bathrooms are by far the most fun and effective hand dryers I have ever used. I think they’re called Dyson Air Blades…or something equally sexy sounding. You basically put your hands down into the machine and then slowly lift them out. It blows a really thin stream of air across your hand, effectively squeegee-ing your hands. If this machine was paired with the hand washers at Rudy’s BBQ you’d have the ultimate hand sanitizing experience.

 

That’s how exciting this airport is…..

 

My favorite Chinese word of the day:

Hamburger – Hanbaobao - 汉堡包

 

2 weeks before I leave.

Well, in just over 2 weeks I'll be heading to Beijing! I'm going to write in this blog as much as I can to let people back in the U.S. /U.K. know what I'm up to this semester. I'll try to post pictures and videos as much as I can - let's face it, who likes to read a lot. A picture is worth a thousand words, and video are like...60 pictures per second? So videos are 60,000 words per second. I know I can't read that fast.

Thinking up the title of this blog took me a while. I finally settled with “Rob 在北京" (Rob Zai Beijing). Which unimaginatively translates to Rob in Beijing. It's hard to title something that doesn't exist yet, you know? It would be like the author thinking of the title of a book before writing it. I'm sure I could think of a more meaningful and clever name for this blog in a few months, but for now I'll stick with it.

If anybody reading this has any suggestions for type of blog posts they want to see or just general suggestions for the blog email me at rsecker@mail.utexas.edu.

I don't know how good my internet access will be, but if i could manage this summer, I'll be just fine in Beijing.

再见！