龙舌 Dragon Tongues

My host family is very cool.  There’s a mom and a dad and a 14-year old son.  The mom works at a big bank in the international transactions division and the dad heads a development company. The son is also very nice and his English is quite good, considering he’s only 14 (the mom’s isn’t bad either). They live in a middle-class apartment building and have a seemingly normal three bedroom, 1.5 bath, one level apartment.  They all have a great sense of humor and are very light hearted.

As the dad spends most of his time in Beijing for work, my family took me there the first weekend.  We visited Tian’anmen Square, and saw the impressive National Center for the Performing Arts, commonly called the Egg.  Then we had a very nice hot pot dinner and then we went to the family’s house that they had recently purchased in Beijing.

The house is actually about 30 kms outside of Beijing, but as soon as we got off the highway, I realized that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.  The sign on the huge stone entryway could have easily said  ‘Willow Bend’  or  ‘Legacy Oaks’, welcoming us to the development that could have been easily found in any posh suburban estate community in the US.  As we drove past the rows of Western-styled houses with manicured lawns, I quickly understood why they had asked me at dinner if I played golf.  Their house, which abuts another house, is awe-inspiring.  Three floors, five bedrooms, three bathrooms. Gorgeous Chinese furniture and artwork. This is certainly New China.

In the morning, we had dinner at the country club, and then hit the driving range.  I’m not so bad, but I’m not so good, either.  I could have never imagined one week prior that I would be hitting golf balls at a golf course community in Beijing, China.

(I have photos to post, but as I now have to go to class, I’ll post them later).

Wow, where to begin?

The 14-hour flight was actually not that bad. I watched three movies, ate three times and probably slept about three minutes. Unfortunately, we landed in the old terminal, so I didn’t get to the see the terminal built for the Olympics. After clearing immigration and customs, my teacher was waiting to pick me up, which was a relief. We took a bus across Beijing to the West Train Station (北京西) and waited for about an hour before the train left.

My observations were numerous on this first jaunt across Beijing. Beijing has tons of people. Tons. And tons of buildings. On the landing approach, you could see huge apartment complexes for miles. There are also huge signs everywhere with big Chinese characters. While the bus was wading through traffic, I had another realization. In the West, there’s a stigma regarding Asian drivers. We complain that the (generalized) Asians don’t pay attention to where they’re going and seem to have no idea of their surroundings. In my sole week of the Chinese experience, I’ve discovered the underpinnings of this stigma. Here, traffic is not delineated by different dotted and dashed lines, where everyone follows what’s precisely prescribed. Rather, traffic is an undulation of ebbing and flowing waves in all directions, forward and side-to-side. No one seems to get upset when a car gets ahead of you, delaying your journey by a couple of seconds. Horns are always being beeped and bike bells are always being rung, symbolically signifying the recipient to get the hell out of the way. I’ve deduced that this, however, is more of a psychological release: no one ever listens. On the major streets, bicycles, mopeds and scooters have their own medianated lane. As I use a bike to get around this huge city (Shijiazhuang - 石家庄), it’s simply awesome to look down the long, straight boulevards and see a sea of people on their bikes and scooters.

That was a bit of a tangent: oh well.

Unexpected: my host mom made me a ham sandwich for breakfast and it was really good.

The horrible earthquake was more than 1000 kilometers away and luckily, it was only slightly felt here.

So, I know that I’ve been über-delinquent in posting.  No excuses, but there’s just been too much happening and too little time to write.  Just to reassure you, everything in China is great!  My host family is great, the school is great and the city, Shijiazhuang, is huge and has much to explore!

Promises, promises, but I promise to try to write more and give you the lo-down on all that’s happening.

1) There are squiggly characters everywhere.  It’s daunting to think how many characters I need to learn, wow.

2) The Chinese are serious snackers, and that is good.

3) The streets in both Beijing and Shijiazhuang are very clean and seemingly orderly.  I didn’t notice any excessive smog haze in Beijing, but my eyes did burn a little bit.

4) In the larger plazas, there are huge TV displays playing movies, funny commercials.

5) At the bus stops, there are line wardens that are in charge of making sure that people form orderly lines.  They have nice red sashes and wave little red flags.

6) The pressures of education and testing well permeate everything.  As soon as the people sitting across from me on the train found out I was USAmerican, the conversation quickly turned to education and the added, maybe unnecessary, stress children face here in China.

7) Drink hot water.

I’m here in lovely Shijiazhuang after a long flight, bus and train ride.  The neon is bright and the people are plentiful.  Can’t write much now, as I need to shower and finally get some sleep, so I’ll post a longer entry soon.