It is early Thursday morning, and we are safe and sound in Beijing. In this post I’ll bring you up to speed on our travel, share some observations and insights, and cover a few technical things about the posts (this will be especially helpful to those who are coming to China in the near future)
After about 18 hours of flying we touched down in Beijing. The kids were phenomenal on the flight and our layover in Newark. The plane was new and newly remodeled so it seemed brand new. We managed to get the seats with the power outlets, so Collin could plug in the DVD player and watch whatever he wanted – as if the 157 “play on demand movies,” and 612 assorted cartoons, sitcoms and documentaries weren’t enough to keep him occupied. Never the less – he was a happy camper. Personally, I learned that I can only withstand 2 full Austin Powers movies in any given sitting. After that, it’s just not funny anymore – oh well. Mer and I each slept for about three hours the entire flight.
Upon touchdown we were taken by our very friendly guide, Tom, to our hotel. We took some time to refresh ourselves, fighting the urge to curl into a ball and sleep on any horizontal surface, and headed out to find some authentic Chinese food. We ended up at KFC (I’ll explain that in a bit), we returned to the hotel and slept sporadically through the night. We are so refreshed that neither Mer nor I am suffering from those sporadic bouts of dizziness that accompany jet lag exhaustion. Yeah.
Here are several observations I hope you find helpful:
1. Beijing is a huge city. During our approach into the city I couldn’t help but notice how huge this city and country are. I really had no comprehension of it. The city is laid out on a plain area that rises up into the foothills of the mountains of the high desert (Gobi or Mongolian?). It reminded me of the approach into LA where one finds the city laying in a basin at the foot of the mountains. Only Beijing is full of massive buildings like New York. Basically imagine LA, only bigger and about as dense as NYC. By the way, they are still building. Now, imagine the roads all planned and wide like Orlando.
- This is a totally different culture. In all my travels around the world, I have never felt more like a foreigner. At least in the Western world, I could recognize letters and sounds. Even in Israel, I knew the Hebrew letters enough that I could find what I was looking for. But, here I don’t even know where to start. For dinner, we were going to go to a Chinese restraint on one of the walking streets not far from the hotel. The front desk gave us the name of the restaurant, and even wrote the name down for us – in Chinese. Upon getting out of the taxi, though, I couldn’t tell one Chinese character from another. I’d hold up my little note in the air and compare it to the sign in front of a restaurant, and literally have no idea what I was looking at. We gave up on that and were about to go into a restaurant only to recognize everything was in Chinese and there was no picture menu. While people were very friendly, that’s how we ended up at KFC. It was still good, though. By the way, when in a foreign country, or trying to communicate with people who don’t speak your language, saying the same thing slowly or louder does not help – neither does saying it in Spanish. Don’t ask me why I did that – it just slipped out and really confused them.
Overall, we are blessed and thankful to be here. Right now I have a very keen sense of what it will be like for Caleb to adjust to us. Looking at my culture shock, I can really empathize with him. Coming here has helped me to “get it” in a way that only reading about it cannot.
On a more techie note, especially for those who are traveling to China soon, here is some advice on setting up your blog. From China, I cannot access my actual blog page, nor read any comments on the page. Luckily, I set up a bookmark to my “editing” page, and I set up the page to email any view comments to my g-mail account. So, while it is a shot in the dark as to what my China posts are going to look like, I can read your comments and post.
Today we play, and I will post some more pix tonight.
