Hello all from Beijing, China! I’ve been here for two evenings now and have been overcoming the jet lag as much as possible. Last night we got back to our hotel around 7:30, and I could only stay awake for about another hour before I had to go to bed. I can’t remember the last time I went to bed at 8:30, but I also had a pretty easy time falling asleep. Now I'm up early and am writing this from my hotel.
The trip has been incredible so far. My company sent me over here in first class where instead of asking you questions like “would you like some peanuts?”, they ask you questions like “would you like a cheeseburger or a salad? Along with a bunch of drinks that are free? And I’ll keep offering this to you every 20 minutes if you’re awake?” The flight to Beijing was cool too…the flight attendants even call us by name, asking things like “what do you want for your appetizer, Mr. Waller?” I kept wanting to say, “you do realize I’m just some young punk…”
Anyway, the flight to Beijing was about 12 hours, and I slept through maybe 3 or 4 hours of it. We landed at about 10:00 PM, and my body was a bit screwed up at that point since it really should have been 10:00 AM. The airport is where I saw my first bundle of really confusing advertisements…one of them showed a guy who was hunting bears on a golf course. No idea what’s going on there.
Going through customs was really easy and took maybe 10 or 15 minutes. After we got out, there was this long line of people with signs with a bunch of people’s names on them. I found the person with the “Dan Waller” sign who works for the hotel we are staying at, and she was very friendly, as are most of the people here. We drove back to the hotel, and I slept some, though not a lot, since my body was telling me that it’s the middle of the afternoon and isn’t supposed to be time to sleep all day!
The hotel I’m staying at here is a Hilton and is very nice. There’s a glass-top desk here that I’m writing this on right now, and the bathroom looks very cool with some cool Eastern design stuff going on. I’ll try to post pictures if I can…(I’m writing this offline and will post it online when I get to work, where the internet is free. Turns out it isn’t free at the hotel!)
Ok, so food. So far, it is delicious, and the restaurant we went to last night was incredibly good. For breakfast, the hotel serves a buffet, and thankfully they give you regular silverware since I think everywhere else is going to require me to use chopsticks. It’s a big buffet of the foods I’m used to, like fried eggs, french toast, watermelon and other fruits, though there’s some asian food in there too which I will have to try. Their pepper is only white pepper, no black. Oh, and breakfast is also where I saw this big digital billboard that swapped between lots of advertisements, and half of them seem to show off the Chinese military with all of their tanks and missiles and troops and all that. The other ones are for cars and what looks like Kung Fu movies to me.
Lunch was a very different experience, which I had at our work cafeteria. There is one container of food that they give to everyone which had chicken, potatoes (and potato-like-things that I didn’t recognize), spinach, noodles, a couple of chicken drumsticks, and then some rice on the side. Oh and a banana too. And a piece of bread. A TON of food, and yet nobody in the cafeteria seems to eat it all. It seems like the norm is to eat about 50 – 75% of what’s on your plate, and then if you can take the food with you (like bananas), then you do. Also, nobody brought anything to drink, which was really crazy to me. It might be that a lot of the food is somewhat wet, so maybe they don’t feel like they need a beverage to wash it down? But seriously, there wasn’t a single person who brought a beverage to lunch.
The only available utensil was chopsticks, and I am definitely no expert at using them, but I can at least feed myself. Large objects are wonderful. Rice is a total mess for me, and if I wasn’t trying to grab the sticky white rice and went for fried rice, I’d be in trouble. They even use their chopsticks to pick up those chicken drumsticks, which takes some serious dexterity in my opinion. I finally figured out how to do it myself after dropping it several times. The people around me seem to have a more lazy approach to using chopsticks and use them to stab the food rather than grabbing it around the outside. Maybe I’ll give that a try today.
We had dinner at a restaurant that I didn’t learn the name of. The Chinese custom is to order food that everyone will buy, but between four people we still ordered four family size dishes and had a bunch of food leftover at the end. If I remember right, it was duck, beef, chicken, and a vegetable. The duck was sliced into these thin strips of meat and skin that were very neatly arranged on this plate. There was also a dish of sweet and sour sauce and hot sauce and another plate of these very thin tortilla-like things, though thinner even than tortillas. The objective of all of this was to take a few pieces of duck meat and duck skin and dip them into either sauce, set them onto these thin tortilla-like things, sprinkle either garlic pieces or onion pieces on top, then roll it up like a burrito with a closed-off end and then eat it. And it was incredibly tasty. Oh yeah, there was also this other meat dish mixed in with some small vegetables and curry sauce, and you take these small buns and stuff all this stuff into them and eat those. Our Chinese hosts joked that these are like mini hamburgers. I suppose it’s true.
And one last thing about the restaurant: there were tons of waitresses there, probably one for every three guests, though it wasn’t all that full at the time. They all stand in various corners of the dining room, and they are basically beckoned over as soon as you are ready to order or want them to bring you something else. When we ordered our food, they brought it all out at different times, bringing one plate after maybe 5 minutes and then a new one every 5 or 10 minutes after that. They also offered us all of the bones from the duck we ordered and brought the bag out to us, which in my opinion is kind of a gross and disturbing offer, haha.
There is probably a lot more to tell, but I should probably start getting ready for the day. I woke up somewhat early after going to bed extremely early, and I feel much more refreshed now. I’ll likely post this when I get to work and will see if I can get some pictures uploaded too.
The weekend plans are to at least see the Great Wall and go to the Summer Palace. I think it’s supposed to rain on Sunday, unfortunately, but the weather should be good for Saturday. I’ll look to update this again sometime over the weekend.
And I would end this with the Chinese saying for “see you soon” or anything similar, but I still know 0 Chinese. Oh well!
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