From LAX to PEK and then some...

Hello!!

It has taken me five days to be able to access this blog site (China's notorious firewall as promised prevented me from even loading the page on what is an unbelievably slow Internet connection), but thanks to the Light Fellowship office and GLadder, a very helpful plug-in, I'm finally back in action.

After arriving at the dorms from the airport on Friday, I was greeted by a TV screen playing the Lakers game. Now, I thought this would be a wonderful "Welcome to China!" present, only to watch the Lakers fail miserably. And as I sit here typing now, I am watching the Lakers lose by 30 points in what will most likely be the Celtics championship winning game. It's too devastating to watch.

On a more descriptive note, I'm staying in a double on the 10th floor of Capital Normal University, which is on Beijing's Third Ring Road. It's not a very warm place, since all of the universities in China were moved to the outskirts of town during the cultural revolution to curtail protesting students from influencing other Beijing citizens in the city's center. However, we have been able to find some diamonds in the rough. There's a great noodle place down the road (when in China, you get used to eating lots of noodles) and a Sichuan cuisine restaurant farther down (although there has been one case of someone getting food poisoning from there, but for me so far so good.

Wu Mart, though, is perhaps the find of our time here. What seems like a small convenient store from the street morphs into a huge Costo-like market that sells everything from pots and pans to fresh fruit to Ritz crackers. We haven't been able to use the campus cafeteria yet, so Ritz crackers and yogurt have become staples of my daily diet. All the American snacks you could hope for are also found in China: Oreos, goldfish, Chips Ahoy, Nature's Valley, Extra gum, and Pringles. Maybe they're not the healthiest choices, but they definitely keep the hunger pangs at bay.

Our second night here, my roommate and I ventured out to KFC of all places. I've never been to KFC in the states, but if it's anything like the KFC here, I'll probably steer clear. I think I'll stick to the Chinese food.

I have managed one trip into the center of Beijing so far. One particular sight struck me the most: amidst the lights, Olympics posters, street venders, and rickshaws were a few teenagers probably around my age playing a familiar game in a building front. While at Yale last semester, a few of my friends (you know who you are) developed a game in which they tried to throw a ball through the openings in the stonework above the Farnam entryways. Having the ball pass through the biggest opening was Level 1, the second largest was Level 2, and so on. In China, these teenagers were playing this same game which we all tried so hard to perfect back at Yale, except with a basketball rather than a baseball. It was definitely a moment of cross-cultural understanding.

My roommate and I had another cultural experience last night. It seems as though every night the university is turning off either our water or our electricity from 11 pm to 4 am. Last night, it was water, and as the two of us were studying in our rooms, we realized that our water was about to run out. I ran to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and by the time my roommate was midway through brushing hers, the water stream started to grow weaker and weaker, until it would just spit out random gushes of water every other twenty seconds. We realized the toilet, the shower, and the sink were all done for the night, and suddenly our nightly routine was no longer as punctual and habitual as usual.

So I know this post has been a book's length, but it's easy to take for granted all of the things we have in the states that don't come so easily to people in China. My language partner (a Chinese university student that helps us with our language study) came up to my dorm room yesterday, a dorm room that I thought was pretty small given the spacious accommodations I was used to at Yale, and what is just a room for my roommate and me is the same size as a room for her and seven other girls. I'm used to fast wireless Internet, drinkable tap water (for the most part), relatively clear air, and a working laundry room, and yet while it was initially so hard to imagine life here without all of those things, it's slowly starting to seem like more and more of a possibility. I appreciate all the things I am lucky enough to have, and as cheesy as that sounds, it's true. After all, I have to find something to make me happy after this terrible Lakers loss.

Final score: 131 - 92

Now off to class. Until later, 再见! (Zai jian = goodbye)

-Tess