The Wandering Chocoholic

Greetings from Beijing, China!

I arrived here after a long but mostly uneventful flight. I took off yesterday morning from Montreal. I had a brief layover in Toronto, during which I stopped into the pub for some lunch, and then made my way to the international terminal to find that I was the only non-Asian person waiting at the gate. Even the announcements were only in Chinese, and I hadn’t even left Canada yet. Yep, I’m officially a minority from here on out on this trip. Better get used to it.

My 13-hour direct flight went over the Arctic Circle, so it never got dark. With the time difference, I skipped right over last night to arrive this afternoon. Gotta love that international dateline.

To pass the time on my flight, I watched some movies, dozed a bit, and ate the meals that they kept serving at weird and inexplicable times, even accounting for the time change. Unfortunately when it was time to disembark, I had a brain fart, probably due to excess tiredness, and I left my outlet adapters to change my plugs from North American to Chinese or European in the seat back of the plane. This was colossally stupid of me, since even though China is where all these items are made, the chances of me finding ones here are next to nil. Luckily, Chinese outlets mostly accept North American plugs — everything seems to fit but my hairdryer, which isn’t essential. It’s going to be a problem when I get to Central Asia, though.

Beijing is a large, chaotic, overwhelming city. People, people, people everywhere. Landing at rush hour didn’t help, of course. I bypassed the insanely long queue for a taxi and took the Airport Express train to Dongzhimen, one of the biggest, busiest transit hubs in the city. Pushing my way through the crowds, loaded down with all my luggage, it felt a little like I was a character in a video game, needing to make it through from the airport train to the subway in order to make it to the next level. Well, level up, because I got to my hotel only 45 minutes after leaving the airport. Those poor sods in line for a taxi were probably still waiting.

Of course, I feel terribly illiterate here in China. Not being able to read the signs means that I’m at the mercy of translations and pre-arranged directions. I had a similar feeling in Japan, but there, everything was very efficient and organized and quite a few people spoke some English. Here, on the other hand, I’m truly unable to communicate. Mandarin is a tonal language, so even trying to pronounce transliterated terms is a bit of a futile exercise. Furthermore, nobody speaks any English — not that I’d expect them to — and people also don’t seem to understand the universal language of hand gestures that tends to let me get around in most places in the world.

I was pretty tired when I got to the hotel, but no rest for the weary: It was time to meet the folks I’ll be travelling with for the next three weeks. There are seven of us: five women and two men. Collectively, we represent the Commonwealth fairly well: there’s myself, another Canadian, two Brits, an Australian, a South African, and the one exception, a Swiss guy. Oh, and our tour leader, Howard, who is a local from Xi’an. The group has a nice age range from early 20s to late 60s, which puts me and the other 30-somethings pretty much smack dab in the middle. Everyone is travelling solo except for two cousins from the UK who came on the trip together. Everyone seems nice so far, though we haven’t had much of a chance to get to know each other just yet.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant around the corner, supposedly for Peking Duck. Peking Duck in Peking, get it? Yeah, well we didn’t get it. ‘Cause after everyone ordered, they brought out rounds of appetizers and other dishes, which we ate, only to then be informed by the waitress that they were all out of Peking Duck. Fail. Oh well, maybe we’ll try again tomorrow night.

After dinner, we took care of a few essentials, like buying water and visiting an ATM. My SIM card arrived for my phone, and I managed to get it from the hotel front desk after a few false starts. So I have a local phone number and mobile data, though my VPN is being finicky so Facebook and Gmail are hit-or-miss. Then, I organized my bags, took a much-needed shower and went to sleep.

More soon!