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.