Week 1

It has been nearly 1 week since I left Indiana.  Not surprisingly, an incredible amount of stuff has happened.  In this post, I’ll cover some of the major developments and include a few thoughts about the city I in which I now live.  In the future, I want the blog to involve far less blow-by-blow recounting of events and more reflections on highlight experiences.  But to start, I need to tell you where I am and how I got here.

 

Beginning at the beginning: I woke up at 3:45 am last Monday morning and started my trip with a car ride to Indianapolis.  My flight plan took me from Indy (no free wireless) to Chicago (also no free wireless) to Seattle (good coffee and free wireless) to Beijing (no free wireless).  The flight from Seattle to Beijing was on a Chinese carrier called Hainan.  It was an absolutely fantastic flight.  Beautiful new plane.  Lots of leg room.  Cute stewardesses.  Good selection of films to watch.  (Among other things, I watched Match Point, which was inexplicably dubbed in French, and Sleepless in Seattle in their entirety.)  The flight was also several hundred dollars cheaper than anything else I saw.  So for the few of you who expressed serious interest in coming out to see me during the next two years, I'd highly recommend using the carrier if you can.

 

I eventually landed in Beijing at (local time) 4:55 pm last Tuesday.  Initially I struggled getting money and contacting my host, but I eventually got out of the airport and onto the metro.

 

At this point, I must pause and flashback to the Saturday before I left.  While packing to live for 2 years in China, I worked from the assumption that, in Beijing, I could purchase just about anything I needed in terms of clothing, electronics, food, etc.  The items I knew would be more difficult to come by were medicine and English books.  So I packed lots of both.   My ‘book bag,’ which was a nice Patagonia carry-on, was stocked with at least 20 books and weighed somewhere north of 40 lbs.  Clothing, meds, electrical wires, duct tape, etc. were all in my hiking backpack.  My computer, toiletries, a spare change of clothes, and the two books I was reading were all in my second carry-on.  When standing fully-clothed but unencumbered on the scale in my house, I weigh about 165.  With all my bags, I topped 270.  And the key, boys and girls, is none of my bags had wheels of any kind.  So when I moved around an airport or a city, I was carrying it all.

 

Jumping back to our story, eventually, I got off the airport express metro, transferred metro lines, and walked to my host’s apartment.  By the time I arrived, I was pretty well drenched in sweat.  I got there at about 7:15 pm Tuesday night, which translates to 7:15 am in EST.  So all told, I was in transit for about 26.5 hours.

 

My gracious hosts for the first few days in Beijing were an old friend from my ’04 study abroad program, Even, and her boyfriend, Nick.  Even graduated from Carleton College, works for a company that fosters the use of alternative energy sources in China, and has been in China close to three years now.  She is very kind and what I would describe as visibly, gracefully intelligent.  Nick is a Dartmouth grad who works on the English-language website for a economic periodical in Beijing.  He is a passionate guy whose interests spread across the spectrum and who is instantly likeable.  Both are great people and were tremendous hosts.

 

The first few days after my arrival were the perfect, low-key introduction to the city.  I had no responsibilities between Tuesday and Saturday.  This allowed me to do a little exploring, a lot of sleeping, and to generally acquaint myself with the subway system and taxi service of the city.  A few highlights: went to see the National Grand Theater (the Egg) where I hope to see a ballet in about a month, had some terrific Peking duck and some excellent Korean barbecue, shopped at two different Wal-Marts in the city, bought a Chinese cell phone, met a slew of very smart expats from all over the world doing all sorts of things.  The night before I registered for classes and moved into the dorm, I got to hang out with two more friends from my ’04 study abroad semester.  All told, there are 4 of the total 16 participants of the SIT fall ’04 program currently living in Beijing.  A fifth member is living in a city to the south.  Anyway, it was great to spend time with those folks, all of whom are great, none of whom I’d seen since leaving China the last time.

 

Registration at the Beijing Film Academy occurred on Saturday.  With a little help from a cinematography student from France and an animation student from Brazil, I got through unscathed.  The staffers assigned me a dorm room and gave me a schedule.  I’m living in the international student dorm along with about two dozen others who hail from at least 5 continents.  I’ve already mentioned people from France and Brazil.  So far I've met others from Germany, Malaysia, Nigeria, Venezuala, Antigua, Japan, Korea, Austria, Israel, Armenia, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some others.  My roommate is currently studying Mandarin and will eventually enroll as a photography major at Beijing Film Academy.  His name is Mario, and he is from Barbados.  It is also his 19^th birthday today.  (As an old man, I curse his youth.  But our living arrangement vividly reminds me of when I was 18 and living and working in a dorm in Hong Kong along with a 24 year old from NYC.)  It is a great joy to talk with people from all over the world who are interested in different elements of film history and filmmaking traditions.

 

My current class schedule is pretty fantastic.  I am in language courses from 8 am until noon everyday.  I have the rest of the day off.  My coursework is spread between three subjects: grammar/writing, oral instruction, and listening.  During many of the hours when I'm not in class, I plan on being out in the city practicing my Mandarin and/or studying.  Things started pretty fast and furious today, and I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot very quickly.

 

I’ve finished my first day’s classes and am now sitting in my dorm room.  We have internet in the room, and it is of a reasonably high speed (DSL/Cable, not T1 or T3).

 

Now a few initial observations:

1.  Beijing has become a first-class world city.  Defining such a thing is impossible, I know.  And I hate how even I tend to operationalize the criteria (impressive stores/businesses) but let me point out that I’ve seen the following establishments: Apple Store, North Face, Columbia, Fendi, Gucci, Armani, Coach, Burberry, Ikea, giant Adidas Outlet, giant Nike Outlet, several Microsoft offices, Porsche dealership, I know over 60 Starbucks exist in the city.  The subway is very clean and very efficient.  At present there are only 5 major, and 2 minor (airport and Olympic site) subway lines.  Within another year, I’m pretty sure at least one more major line will open.  All buses and taxis within the city appear, at most, two years old.  And, in stark contrast to city I saw even four years ago, the streets are seriously clean.  In sorting through my memories of China, my experiences in Beijing so far remind me much more of my experiences in Hong Kong six years ago than Kunming or even the few days I spent in Beijing in ’04.  The place looks and seems to run great which leads to my next point…

 

2. The $40 billion USD that the government spent on the Olympics is constantly apparent.  The cleanliness of the streets, pristine state of the public transpo, and most crucially, the quality of the air are all at record highs.  I honestly think I arrived in Beijing at something of a historical apex.  (Not trying to imply this is the 'best' it has ever been, but it is some sort of apex.)   All the environmental restrictions in place for the Olympics are still in effect through the end of the Paralympic games, which run for another two weeks or so.  We’ll see how things change then.  City residents by the hundreds of thousands are already signing petitions to continue many of the environmental restrictions.  They like their clean air.  I do too, but I'm thinking not much will change.

 

3. The expat community is really eclectic and amazingly fun.  People come to China for a lot of reasons.  I’ve met really motivated individuals who have specific goals they are devoted to, and I’ve seen some people who are here because the city is rapidly modernizing, newly cosmopolitan, and still cheap (though the pathetic value of the U.S. dollar and the new semi-flotation of the RMB resulted in an exchange rate that was 18% less than it was four years ago). So far I've met the son of the American ambassador, David Blaine’s half-brother, several Fullbright and ex-Fullbright scholars, people running their own businesses, people teaching English, people working on marketing, people studying law/Mandarin/cinematography/history.  The community is very cyclical in the sense that it is constantly losing and gaining members.  Even and Nick made a list of 32 friends they knew who were leaving this late-summer/early-fall.

 

Alright, I’m going to quit now.  This seems like a good start.  I have more thoughts I’d like to let percolate a bit before I post them.  Again, if you know anyone who you think might be interested in reading this blog but who you know isn’t getting e-mail messages from me, let me know.  Oh, and I’ve been pretty terrible about taking pictures so far.  If I get better, I’ll start up a Flicker account and link to it.