well, dear readers, i hope you're ready for the "i'm in beijing" blog entry. i know you've all been sitting at your computers, constantly checking my blog while simultaneously biting on your fingernails, praying that nothing had gone wrong with my flight and that no other disaster had befallen me. well you can rest easy.
my flight was fine, although i did learn a valuable lesson. after my last flight to beijing, where i was annoyed to discover that american airlines had those kinds of personal tvs where the movies are screened for everyone at the same time and only restarted when all the other movies have ended, i decided that i would never fly american again. i guess i was thinking that all other airlines would be like the fabulous japan airline, which i took when i came here to study abroad. wrong! air china did not have any personal tvs, and the one big screen projector in my section was broken. not that it mattered much, because when i walked through the other sections, i saw they were screening some random chinese movie. the air conditioning was also broken for the first half hour of the flight, meaning that there were a lot of sweaty people on that plane. other than that though, the flight was fine. my roomie met me at the airport with minimal difficulty, and we hopped a bus back to the apt.
the apartment is really nice, great location, only a fourth floor walk-up (two better than where i lived last summer), wireless internet, i've got a tv in my room, and my window looks down on a middle school track and basketball court. not that that is particularly exciting, but it's sort of amusing, especially because all chinese students have to do morning exercises before class.
so i got up at 6:45 today (oh, the jet lag) and decided i'd walk around the neighborhood to get a sense of things. first i went to our closest grocery store, to check out the offerings there. it's actually a russian store, because we're right next to the russian embassy. i can also see that from my window. i was a little annoyed, because i'm like, i came to china, not russia. but one look through the store changed my mind. there is a massive variety of cheese (which can rarely be found in chinese groceries cuz they just don't eat it), extremely cheap vodka and lots of other food i'd actually like to eat. but get this- i looked into one of their refrigerators, and what should i see? hot dogs! so there, all you smug new yorkers chomping away on your frankfurters. it might not be any grays papaya, but it's there. they also have pickles. i'm never going back to ny.
so more of my day. i went into lots of chinese supermarkets to look at the food (i always get a kick out of that, they eat such crazy food). then i took the subway over to the silk market, one of the most famous places to buy knock offs. on the way there, a few people tried to speak english to me. last summer i was really snooty about this, because i always distrust chinese people who come up to foreigners to speak english at major tourist locations, but my uncle made me feel really bad about that when he visited me. so, turning a new leaf, i responded in a somewhat friendly (if not warm) way. i was repaid by the fact that both people who approached me asked me to go look at their calligraphy, something i learned the hard way means that they are going to take you to a gallery where they will work intensely hard to scam you into buying some mediocre art. oh well, so much for niceness.
at the silk market, i somehow ended up buying a pair of fake asics for about 18 US dollars from a woman who thought i was scandinavian. even if you have no intention of buying something, it is nearly impossible to leave that place empty handed. then i went to mcdonalds and got a hamburger (don't judge me! it's the easiest thing to eat on the go). i tried to go to ikea to get some furniture for my room, but the cab driver couldn't understand where i wanted to go.
i know that none of this is super exciting, but it should give you all a sense of what an average day in beijing is like. well hopefully i'll get a job and then that'll be part of my day. you gotta make money to spend money.