Green Beijing

Rickisha says that two years ago the pollution was so bad here in Beijing that within a week, you'd be hacking up black goo and succumb to an inevitable upper-respiratory-tract infection. But so-far, I'm in the clear. It probably has something to do with the government's promise for a green Olympics.

Today, we could actually see the western hills, which Rickisha and I didn't even know existed.

Anyway, Rickisha's here now and has been for about a week, which is probably the biggest reason I haven't written any e-mails recently, the others being that I'm lazy and in school. We've done all the tourist things through the program: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven. They are cool. They are Chinese. It's good to see them, but those big tourist sights aren't really why I am here. I've just started exploring some of the less-traveled neighborhoods around town. Those are the things I really enjoy: the jianbing (delicious pancake things), chuar (kabob), and fruit stands, the neighborhoods with houses older than the Qing Dynasty, old Chinese men playing chess in the park next to old Chinese women practicing fan dancing and assorted calisthenics. I miss the random sights and encounters that I got so much while I was traveling by myself are so hard to come by in a structured program like this one.

But actually, this program is anything but structured. Cai Laoshi (teacher Cai) pretty much arranges the weakly schedule to whatever best suites his needs and doesn't really ask as to whether it is good for anyone else. The recent changes have been an extra hour of class every day bringing the total up to five (I originally signed up for four), Saturday classes, and mid-week field trips. Last week's trip was on a Thursday and so we had Saturday classes (on the 5th of July). A couple of us decided that the 4th of July was more important so we went to a student hangout to celebrate on the night-of and decided to skip class the following. But at nine a.m. the next day, I woke up to Cai Laoshi banging on my door with, "It's 9 o'clock! Time to get up! We have class!" I didn't know this was summer camp. I don't think either of us were very happy about the whole thing.

A lot of us aren't very happy about the structure of the program, and there are no advisors, TAs or RAs to act as mediators, so we organized a meeting so that the students could discuss common grievances and provide some sort of coherent effort rather than just one person (me) complaining about doing work. I am used to a heavy workload (I do go to UChicago after all), but I think that the course could be better structured in order to provide a balance between independent activity and school. The meeting went well, and two of us talked to Cai Laoshi, but we will have to wait until next week to see whether any changes come through.

That's really the most excitement I've seen here so far. It's really good being here, and I do feel like my Chinese is improving, but I still have that itch to just hit the road and not really know where I am going. Just one month until this program ends; coincidentally, that's when the Olympics begin. So while everyone filters into Beijing, I will be trying to slip out the back, out of the big city, and into rural China. Actually I'm probably going to Shanghai, but o-well. That's an adventure too.

We've arrived!

I’ve arrived in the sick soup that is Beijing. That isn’t some cultural reference to clear, egg drop, or noodle, but rather to the fact that the air is so thick with pollution in Beijing that in the average day, you can look directly at the sun and see only a sedated red husk. Rickisha and others say I’ll get used to it, but the constant burn in your lungs is kind of hard to get over.

Rickisha and I split ways in Tokyo, she to Hong Kong, me to Beijing. The plane landed in a weird red fog. I was hoping it was clouds, but it turned out to be the red lights of the airplane reflecting off of a sea of smog.

The taxi ride was perhaps the most exciting event, as nobody knew how to get where we were going. The behemoth "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium loomed out of the haze, eerily lit by flood lights and construction equipment. I knew that Tsinghua University and our temporary hostel was close. It took two stops on the shoulder for the driver to jump out and ask pedestrians directions until we finally saw the sign—Peking Uni International Hostel—on the other side of a divided highway. After around twenty-four hours of traveling, Adrian, who is one of the other students from the program, and I finally arrived at our hostel.

After setting down (and locking up) our bags in the six-bed dorm, we went out to search for Club Propaganda, rumored to be nearby; I strongly agree that one of the best things to get over jet lag is to drink a few beers at night. Anyway, at the club we grabbed a table and were shortly joined by a group of eight-or-so students from Oklahoma University. That crowd reminded me of what it was like to travel. They were rowdy, they were friendly, and they felt the need to voice every single problem they had observed in China during their two-week trip around the country: “How can the education system be so good, but the country is so dirty”, “this is one of the dirtiest places you’ll ever see”, “the other night, we were in a bar and some guy just starting puking everywhere.” They were in town because the president of O-U fell in love with the idea of China after reading a book that said it was the next big thing in business and started paying for students to go see it for themselves. They were mostly international business majors besides the rogue aerospace engineering major and the zoology major who was drunkenly eating a chimmichanga.

We didn’t spend too long there before coming back to an uneasy jet lagged sleep. The itinerary for today is to meet up with the rest of our group at Tsinghua University who should be fresh off the plane from Chicago and move into the dorm there. Hopefully I’ll get to see the sun, so it can reset my interior clock to China-time.

And I just discovered that blogger.com is firewalled in China, so even though I can update this, I won't be able to read it. Weird, huh? Welcome to the People's Republic.