Welcome to Beijing

Friday, September 4th, 2015

04:30AM, China Standard Time (published once I got internet, this afternoon)

Beijing, Yenching Academy Dorms, Room 6334

Well, I’ve arrived in Beijing. I came in on HU498 direct from Chicago last afternoon, and managed to miss the forecasted massive delays resulting from the 70^th anniversary of V-J day parade that had shut down airspace all morning. So far, I love that parade – not that I saw any of it, but to make for the best visuals, the Chinese government had been working overtime bringing down the air pollution – factories were shut down, coal plants’ output was reduced, and strict license plate rationing was in place (only certain license plates allowed to drive each day – another great happenstance for me, since as a result we encountered absolutely no traffic along the usually breathtakingly clogged 4^th Ring Road from the airport to 北大 (Běidà, the colloquial short form for Peking University)).

The flight itself was my first with a SKYTRAXX 5* airline (a rating given by a bourgey frequent flyer organization shared only by 7 airlines in the world, including Singapore, JAL, and Qatar), and was very pleasant despite its 13-hour length. It was my second with a B787 Dreamliner; I don’t think the electronic dimming of the massive windows that replaced the clunky plastic shades found on other planes will get old for a long time. This dimming and the cabin LEDs allows for an actual realistic natural-light-looking shortened day-night cycle to be implemented in the cabin to attempt to decrease the effect of jet lag (It somewhat worked? I did wake up at 4am this morning, but considering the 13-hour time difference, it could’ve been worse).  My proudest moment of the day was asking tea from the flight attendant (she had two kinds, I definitely didn’t know their names in Chinese, so I came up with a brilliant solution – I asked, ‘do you have any tea?’ (你们有没有茶？). When she inevitably listed the two teas, I used my vast knowledge of Chinese to say ‘the first one’ (第一次). It all went great, the Chinese couple next to me gazed at me in wonder, but then the flight attendant inevitably threw a long, complicated sentence at me as she was handing me the tea (it could have been ‘do you want something in the tea’ or ‘omg a white person speaking Chinese’ for all I know) and my charade was unfortunately ruined by the resultant confused expression on my face. Oh well. I tried).

Dreamliners are cool. 

Despite Beijing Capital International Airport having one of the largest freestanding structures in the world as its T3, we were treated to the ol’ tarmac-and-bus affair from a parking spot somewhat isolated from the rest of the airport. This did allow for some truly excellent planespotting – Beijing attracts a great assortment of old Soviet jets that you can’t see in the West (because, you know, safety regulations), including a rare look at SKYTRAXX’s only 1* airline in the world, North Korean flag carrier Air Koryo, and a glance at governmental planes from Egypt, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan, presumably in town for the V-J festivities. Once again, I got incredibly lucky with Chinese bureaucracy – the immigrations and customs process took all of 30 seconds (pro tip – if you’re flying into Beijing, fly into Terminal 2 (so with Hainan, China Eastern, etc.) – the flights that make Beijing Capital the 2nd busiest airport in the world mostly come into Terminal 3, so the big waits are there. T2’s international section is almost eerily empty by comparison).

Air Koryo!

One thing that I will probably point out many times – Beijing is friggin impressive. The city has the population of the whole New York region, with miles upon miles of high rises out in the suburbs, built for the unimaginable 300-million-strong migration from the Chinese rural West to its massively dense urban East. Driving along the 4^th Ring Road at night gives you a view of a seemingly endless row of office buildings, company headquarters, government buildings, and research institutes (including the ‘Tibetan Chinese History Research Institute’…. Interesting….), all 20 stories tall at least, that line the highway on both sides. Due to height restrictions in the historic city center, a density map of the inner districts of Beijing looks like a donut defined by the numerous concentric ring roads. I’ll get into Chinese urbanism a bit more as I get more acclimated and have time to explore.

So here I am. I’m currently waiting for the sun to rise so I can get my bearings a bit and buy some essentials. Maybe get some breakfast. Also, my toilet’s been loudly refilling for an hour now (yay living in a dorm that’s literally half a week old!), so I should check that out as well. My next entry will get into a bit more detail about where I’m living, something I still need to fully figure out once it gets light.

你好北京。你好中国。I hope we’ll get along.

PS: Hey! You made it! So this will be my travel blog during my time in China. I’m going be writing these posts ideally pretty regularly. They probably won’t all be as long as the first few will be. But, I can tailor the content to your wishes – I’m going to be keeping a log with impressions either way, for both my own memory/mental processing purposes and to help adjust to culture shock, but I don’t have to post everything I write on this blog. Talk to me in the comments if you want more or less of something, or if you have anything else to say J.