First Days in Beijing

I’m sitting in an underground coffee shop and it’s 10:48am. It’s Martin Luther King Day back home, but it’s business as usual here, even though the Peking University students just went on winter break. This café looks a little like a wannabe Starbucks, but the lack of napkins, snacks, and English makes it clear that this is something else.

I’m four days into this trip, and China is slowly coming into focus. So far I’ve sampled some of the tamer local fare, gotten to know the great kids in our 50-person international program, and started to learn the campus. Our dorm, Shaoyuan #5, is nothing fancy but nice enough. Michael and I live on the 5th and top floor.

We arrived around 3pm on Friday the 15th of January, and only had time to settle into the rooms, grab some snacks from the convenience store Wu Mei (which has been our saving grace), and pass out in our rooms. Things got interesting when Michael plugged in an alarm clock and we blew a fuse. Without having met any of our advisors or received our university phones, we spent the rest of the night unpacking by flashlight without phone, hot water (which turns off at 10pm), internet, or anyone that could speak our language. We were slightly panicked.

The next morning, I attempted to ask the housekeeping ladies for help with our electricity, and after following one of the women down a long winding hall and into a back room, I was presented with a stack of towels. Eventually, our third roommate Andrew, who is very good at Chinese, was able to get the power back on. From that point on, things at Peking University have vastly improved.

Campus is full of sleek new architecture as well as eclectic old-school Asian buildings. Things are dirty, as the noticeable smog seems to scatter a layer of black dust over most everything. There are loads of restaurants, convenience stores, and food stands cluttered around the narrow, winding roads of campus, all of which feature large, colorful signs with characters we can’t read. Standard breakfast fare so far has been an on-the-go dumpling, or baozi. The ones filled with pork and celery are my favorites so far.

On Sunday our orientation group trekked into the inner city to visit the Silk Market, a six-story monstrosity filled with hundreds of booths and vendors selling their cheap, knock-off products. Walking down the narrow aisles, the broken English sales pitches come in rapid-fire, as products are dangled in front of you. I was hit in the face with a pair of boxer briefs. As I walked with my friend Chris (who later would accidentally purchase a gong for $51 USD), we realized that we American students were essentially ‘programmed’ in a way the Chinese people around us were not; each of us felt the need to acknowledge and respond to every single salesperson that approached us. I was constantly smiling, shaking my head, and saying ‘no thank you’ or ‘wo bu yao.” The Chinese locals just cruised through, ignoring the would-be salespeople as if nothing were happening. I was too intimidated by the throngs of desperate vendors to buy anything or even take a picture, but I’ll probably try to return sooner or later to pick up a cheap “Columdia” jacket or even a “Red Soe” baseball jersey.

Our first attempt at shopping in a Chinese super-market was a harrowing experience. The “Carrefour” store was, as my friend Elizabeth so aptly put it, “a Wal-Mart blended with a dollar store in Times Square on Black Friday.” One of the most massive stores I’ve ever seen, we were literally the only foreigners in the place, but the Chinese seemed more interested in rushing around to grab the on-sale merchandise than they were in gawking at us. Upon checking out, I charged our purchases to my credit card, and was promptly presented with a keypad. In hindsight, I realized that the cashier probably wanted my PIN number, even though it was a credit card. That thought didn’t cross my mind at the time, however, and the young cashier and I stared at each other until the awkwardness was too much to bear, and she took the keypad away. When I attempted to grab a plastic shopping bag to carry our things in, I was yelled at by an elderly man that I couldn’t understand. When our 7-shopper crew failed to find an open cab on the wild street outside, we decided to make the 20-minute walk back to campus even with our massive plastic bins and storage units. I managed to pull every muscle in my upper body, and my friend Morgan developed her deep-seeded hatred of the mysterious Carrefour.

However, our worst ‘lost-in-translation’ experience yet came last night, Sunday, at dinner. Michael, Sandy and I went out for a late dinner, about 8:30. Most of our normal restaurants were closed, so we ventured outside of our walled campus and onto the hard streets of Beijing. We settled for a place called Xiang Xiang, a third-floor restaurant that appeared to be full of people from our vantage point on the street. We went in, I awkwardly replied “sí” when they asked if we had 3 people, and we sat down at a table with a small stovetop in the middle. A young Chinese man came out and presented us with an English menu that showed many small lists; one of meat, one of vegetables, one of sauces, one of soups, etc. We pointed at one item after another, but the waiter would not leave; we realized that we were actually picking ingredients for a soup/fondue-like concoction that would be made in front of us. Soon, a bowl with two compartments, each filled with a different kind of soup, arrived. Later, the completely random assortment of foods that we had just ordered arrived; several huge stacks of meat, celery, cabbage, potatoes, etc. As the soups began to boil, a confused friend on the phone told us to put all of the ingredients into the pot, to make a stew-like mixture that would cook with time. We piled the ingredients into the pot, as the employees giggled at us. Eventually, the boiling soups began to overflow, and the suddenly not-busy waiters laughed with us as I wildly stabbed at the pot with chopsticks and attempted to remove some of the objects so the water level would go down. We managed to ruin most of the food, even when mixed with the “monkey wrench” packets of peanut paste that we received. We had paid before the meal, so we eventually made a mad dash out of the restaurant and hustled to the KFC next door. Even though we all felt sick immediately after leaving and had managed to pay for two dinners, we were pleased to have paid for the sheer entertainment value of the outing.