First day in China

February 1^st, 2012

My first blog entry:

My whole day of travel was a serious adventure. Through all the stress and hauling I am now finally settled down in my hotel room..wait….i mean dorm room, but it looks so much like a hotel room. In fact, I’m convinced that this international dorm used to be a hotel at some point in time.

The first thing I noticed when I finally got out of the airport and on to the streets was that it looked exactly like Los Angeles. When flying into the airport, I could not see Beijing, instead I saw a smog cover like that of Los Angeles, but maybe three times worse. I noticed that the cars are smaller, maybe not all of the cars, but the cars that are “supposed to be” big, such as vans and SUV’s are smaller in width.

As we pulled into Beijing university two stray dogs ran by the car…at least I thought they were stray. They were very dirty and chomping on some grass in front of the office that we were going to. We were greeted by a very empty school because all of the students are celebrating the Chinese new year, it’s called the spring festival in China or 春节 (chun jie).

So our hotel rooms are pretty spacious and have a bathroom equipped with them so I am not complaining. Although, it does look like we are in an abandoned semi-broken down hotel room. And the rooms are quite dusty. But it comes with a TV and refrigerator! I am not sure that the TV actually works.

I decided to unpack and in doing so boil some water so that I could drink it. When I plugged in the water boiler the power went out in my room. I now have no power, so I took a shower in the dark. The shower never got warm either so it was a cold shower, which I am very not accustomed to, because I am spoiled and take really warm showers. I didn’t mind the cold shower however, because it is quite warm and musty in my room.

Little did I know that there would be deposits for just about everything once we got to the University. They gave us cell phones, but I can’t charge mine because I have no power. We had to give a deposit for the cell phones and for our room keys! However, we some how got out of the deposit for the room key.

I met a lot of people already, and they have all been very kind. I have already sort of started practicing my Chinese, but everyone tries to speak to me in English. A lot of things here are both in Chinese and English, such as most of the signs.

Today is a free day, so we get to do whatever we want to do. I slept for the whole flight so I am wide awake and I want to go explore Beijing. Luckily all the Pitzer students who are abroad are staying in rooms around me so we will go explore once everyone arrives. I had a pitzer student on my flight from Hong Kong to Beijing, which was really nice!