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.
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