Saturday, July 19

Yesterday was a day full of surprises.

I was up unfathomably early, which I will put down as due to jet lag. At about 5:30 I just didn’t feel like sleeping anymore and got out of bed and fooled around on the computer. Da got up too, though he didn’t exactly look like he wanted to be up, and we chilled outside. People generally stirred, and by 7:00 or so we were having breakfast.

Da described the breakfast that we’d have as “hearty.” That was an understatement. His uncle went off and came back with three large plastic containers each overflowing with dumpling-like doughey things called Bauza. He sat me down with a cup of coffee and told me to eat them, along with cashew nuts, bits of beef jerky, and some sweet fruity something. It was delicious. The difficulty with Bauza or any sort of dumpling that I’ve found is that they are so difficult to stop eating. I had what probably amounted to being one or two too many.

The idea was to have a very lazy day where Da could catch up with some of his relatives and we’d just chill. That’s basically what happened. But as many other things in china, so I’m told, if something’s going to be done it’s going to be done on a big scale, a “China scale.” We chilled and met up with Da’s family on a “China scale.”

First things first, we had to register at the police office to let them know we were in the country. Da’s uncle drove us over and we walked inside. The police office was a large room with concrete floors, a long desk at one end, and many notices on the walls. There were about eight young police officers behind the counter, whom you could see through the glass partition, all apparently doing nothing. I really couldn’t tell why they were there on a Saturday, or if there were perhaps other, better things they could be doing. We gave them our passports and the necessary information about our stay. They began to process the information. They kept processing the information. One of them spoke to Da, and Da spoke to us. “They want you guys to sit down,” he said to Nils and me. “This could take a while.”

That was another understatement. They only had to scan the inside page of the passport into their computer system, but by the time it took you’d have thought that they had done a full criminal background check, cross-referenced by every agency around the world. I suppose they could have been doing this, but judging by the force of manpower on the case I would say that it was pretty unlikely. One officer seemed to be doing all the work, while the others stood around idly, sometimes picking up a passport and looking through the pages and visas, not for any official purpose but just out of a sense of curiosity. One officer who grabbed our attention didn’t even pretend to be working: in the hour or so we were there he just moved back and forth between his standing place and the vending machine, each time coming back with several packs of junk food which he would then proceed to stuff into his face. One trip he came back with four (we counted) packs of snacks, which he proceeded to eat in rapid succession. Again, I wondered exactly why he was there in the first place.

Another funny thing about the police station: as Nils and I were waiting we saw some grubby, lankly looking guy come in to get something sorted. He had a bit of a deep chest cough, not looking in top form. He started wheezing and coughing, and eventually he went to a corner and just started blowing his nose into a small trash can on the floor. He had snot and germs all over his hands, which he then proceeded to wipe on his keys and keyfob. And with that, he went along with his business. Nils and I both looked at each other. We both soon agreed not to touch any public handrails or surfaces in the police station, and in China in general.

Eventually things got sorted, we got our passports back and the slip of paper which proved that we had registered. It had taken about an hour and the collective effort of eight Chinese police officers. That was a surprise.

After that ordeal we got down to the business of meeting and greeting Da’s relatives. We came home for some watermelon and met several more of Da’s cousins, one of whom was married to Wang, who is currently researching in the United States and speaks a bit of English. He was pleasant enough and very polite to keep us entertained in English, though it did mean that Nils and I had to be careful speaking in our secret language which previously only we could understand. Soon we were on our way to lunch, where more of Da’s relatives would join us.

Lunch was a spectacular, glorious event. We got across town and met with more of Da’s relatives, all of whom were happy to see him. Perhaps the most interesting, but also the most inaccessible for we non-Chinese speakers, was his 90 year old grandmother. We all went to a restaurant and got another private room, which you realize is quite a good idea when you see the shouting masses eating in the main dining room. Nils and I were there in the first wave, which meant that quite suddenly the others arrived, one with Da’s grandmother riding piggy-back on one of his uncles. That was a surprise. The food was just as tasty and exotic as it was the day before. Spread before us on the massive revolving glass plate we had kidney, egg tofu soup, crispy chicken (made with the cartilage parts, not the meaty bits), spicy chicken with peanuts, pigs ears (my new personal favorite), and a whole bunch of other things that I wouldn’t have the slightest clue about. There were crawdads on skewers marinated in a delicious sauce. I watched Da’s uncle eat his, head and legs and tail and all, and I followed his example. It was tasty, though a bit spikey in the mouth. And of course there was beer and Chinese spirits. Like the night before, every five minutes one of Da’s uncles would be making a toast, done by banging the glass of spirit on the glass surface of the revolving glass disc, and we’d drink some more. Beer soon followed (with Da’s uncle’s explanation that it was okay to drink beer after spirits, so long as one drank enough of it so that one would burp out the badness in your stomach), as did much merriment.

I don’t know how long we were there, but I thought it was a wonderful meal. I thought I was really lucky to meet so much of Da’s family, even if I couldn’t communicate. The whole restaurant experience, and in many ways this whole country, seems like it was out of a time warp. Here we were, eating a massive feast in our own private dining room where the women were expected to go around lighting the men’s cigarettes. Even just the idea of smoking cigarettes at a dining table, much less in a private dining room with no windows or ventilation, with a small child at the table, is a bit anachronistic. I keep feeling that this is what it must have been like for my parents growing up in America in the fifties and sixties.

When the dinner was over and Da’s grandmother lifted back down the stairs we headed out to meet once again the heat of the day. After one last stop at the apartment we headed right across town to the office/apartment which will be our home after we come back from X’ian, when Sarah and Zach arrive.

Da had prepared me to meet his mother’s friend, the woman whose place we will be staying in. We have come to call her “Ga Ma” in China, which I’m told is a term of affection much like “surrogate mother.” She had, according to legend, used to get into elaborate drinking contests with Bo Chang. The most famous of these culminated in a display of gymnastic ability, which had her doing a hand-stand before Da’s father attempted and threw up all over himself. With Bo and Pien off in America and probably, I presume, no longer willing to participate, she has now made it her mission to see that the sins of the father are visited on the son. The last time that Da and she had met it ended with Da throwing up out of a taxi cab window. She was not to be underestimated. The man with hubris would rue the day. I was ready for her, though I was careful.

Ga Ma and her daughter, Lan, greeted us and showed us to the office. It was perfect, exactly what we will want when we have more people here. Three rooms, one sofa that pulls out to a bed, another sofa that just looks comfy, a kitchen and bathroom. It was looking good. We all sat down to talk. It was about 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. We had just consumed a massive amount of food. Alcohol was involved. I had been up since 5:30. Jet lag figured in there somewhere too. The only person with whom I could have a sustained English conversation all day was Nils, and we were embarking on another similar conversation with our new hosts. “I could really use a nap,” Nils said to me. And that’s when it hit me. Not only could I use a nap, I simply had to have one. It was imperative. So I got up. The sofa bed had been pulled out. I lay down. And I slept.

It was a wonderful nap, but getting up afterwards was hell. Apparently I hopped right out when Da woke me, but I wasn’t feeling that way. I took 25 minutes in the bathroom, still trying to wake. “Ryan better not be sleeping in there,” I heard Da’s voice say through the door. “Ryan? Ryan?!?” I deliberately took about eight seconds to answer before I assured him that I was not sleeping, just as a joke. Or maybe I was just in such a stupor that I didn’t know. At any rate, I wasn’t feeling up for a big kind of dinner. Though given what I’d heard Ga Ma and her exploits, I could only assume the worst.

She and her husband and Lan stopped by and led us to the restaurant across the street. Lan had studied in England so she knew a bit of English, not great English but enough to communicate. We met Maggie, a beautiful girl whose real name I cannot even begin to try to pronounce, much less remember. The restaurant was hot-pot, which meant that they put a boiling cauldron in the middle of the table and give an assortment of raw meat for the party. You take what you want, cook it in the water, and eat it with a peanut and chili sauce that you’ve mixed previously. Just thinking about it makes me hungry again. I was anything but hungry when I arrived; this was to be our third hearty meal of the day. But immediately my appetite was wetted when we got to the business of dinner. We all ate and ate and ate. The main meat they had was lamb, but also on the table were squid, sheep stomach (not so great), assortments of mushrooms, white fish (delicious when fresh cooked like that), and, once again, a whole lot of other things that I can’t even begin to remember. I ate until I felt like a balloon. I ate until it hurt. I ate until I thought I was going to throw up, and then I ate some more. It was just too good to resist.

Another staple last night, and I assume this happens regularly when hanging out with Ga Ma, was beer. We started off simply, innocently, just having a 600 mL bottle each. I was a bit mesmerized when I saw a waiter cart in about fifteen of these bottles, thinking we’d be lucky to finish them all off. How wrong, how very wrong I was. Ga Ma insisted that each time we said “Gam Bay”, which I had previously thought just meant “Cheers,” people finish whatever was left in their glasses. This could apply to the whole table, or you could stand and challenge individuals to a Gam Bay. And the men, she claimed, should drink two glasses for each glass that the ladies drank, as we were bigger and stronger. We got down to it, and there was a lot of beer chugging to go along with the food. Sometimes I thought I was going to throw up. I had mentioned to Da and Nils that I was considering going to the toilet to have a mid-dinner puke session, just to clear things out and present myself like a true champion in front of our hosts; they were not too keen on this idea. The nail in the coffin was going to the toilet and seeing that instead of proper toilets the stalls just had a hole in the floor made of porcelain, which presumably could flush. It didn’t seem like the right place. When I returned from the bathroom I nearly got into some trouble. Maggie stood and toasted Gam Bay, which meant I had two to drink, and when I was done with that Lan toasted to me Gam Bay, which meant another two had to go down. I finished the fourth glass of beer and immediately started to sweat; there was that feeling, known to me all too well in college, where you know that you want to puke but you think you might be able to fight it. It’s not quite imperative, but you’re not sure yet. So I quieted down for about a minute. Thankfully it passed, I burped a bit, and I was able to keep going when Da and Nils returned. I found that once I ‘put down the chopsticks’ and stopped eating that helped a lot, and I was able to carry on with relative ease.

In the end our party finished 40 600 mL bottles of beer. I think back with pride that that figure means we drank 24 liters of beer. I don’t know how that was possible.

It was such an amazing experience. On road to drunkenness I told my hosts, through Da and Lan, that I love Beijing and its drinking culture. They told me that if I like Beijing for that, then I am a true Beijinger. “Ich stein ien Beijinger!” I shouted. Toward the end of the night I would beat my chest like tarzan after finishing a beer. When I came back from the toilet for the second time I caught Lan in the hallway. “Oh, it’s gone crazy in there,” she warned me. I went in and people were doing head-stands against the wall. The sins of the father are the sins of the sun after all, though Da didn’t puke. I did a handstand with the help of Da and Nils. Thinking about those things, I can see how we went through 24 liters of beer. It was a good night.

Our hosts paid for the meal. Da later told me that it cost 700 yuan, total. That’s 60 pounds. 60 pounds for a feast for six people, a good third of which there was no possibility of finishing, and 40 bottles of beer. That’s another thing I love about this country. Before coming home Da and Nils and I had ice cream from a local store. The total price was 1.50 for three ice creams. So each ice cream cost 4 pence. That’s obscene.

We got to Ga Ma’s office/apartment after dinner and checked our email. We took a cab back to Da’s uncle’s place. We got to the apartment and Da’s aunt and uncle were up. We talked. We went to bed. We were exhausted.

18 July 2008

Before Da and Nils arrived I sat around the airport, and marveled some more. It’s a great place. When I saw that Da’s and Nils’s plane had been on the ‘arrive’ screen for about half an hour I went over to the meet and greet line to see if I could find them. It took them another half hour before they came through customs. When I had spotted some western looking people who said they’d been on the flight from Washington I made a sign with a piece of paper that said “Dumb Ass” for Da and Nils. But by the time they got off I was so paranoid that there might be another way out that I kept looking for them as they came through customs. I completely missed them, and it was Da who found me as he walked out of the international arrival gate, looking around hoplesslessly and holding a sign that said “Dumb Ass.” Yes, it felt stupid.

When Da got out it was immediately apparent that not only was I waiting for them, but so were several of his relatives whom I wouldn’t have recognized if he hadn’t pointed them out to me. His cousin, her husband, and two of his aunts were there too, standing about ten feet away from me the entire time I had been standing with my stupid sign. We walked through to the parking structure and loaded our things and ourselves into two cars and headed to the centre of town.

Beijing is a hot place. As soon as we got to the parking structure, which really is a greenhouse with all of its opalescent windows and closed ventilation, we realized this. It was apparent all the way into Beijing. As we were driving on one of the roads we spotted a sad looking man riding in the back of a taxi, his head out the window. He looked miserable, and the moment I focused my eyes on him he started blowing chunks onto the passing pavement. It was hot in the Audi, despite how nice a car it seemed, and seeing him throw up almost made me want to do it too.

But Beijing is a much nicer, greener city than I would have imagined, on first glance. The ring roads that go around the city centre are really small motorways, going past some incredible architecture. A lot of it is just rubbish, glass buildings with a gaudy “Hi Chi Lo Shopping Center” signs on the top of them emblazoned in gold, but there were some real gems too. The new China Television tower is astonishing, mesmerizing even. It’s hard to imagine how, much less why, they would build a tower that was more or less in the shape of two Vs put together.

We got to Da’s uncle’s apartment to unpack our stuff. The apartment block is nice but old; the kind of old that makes it clear that it is well-used and used by many people, but the kind of nice that indicates that the people who do live there keep it well-kept. The apartment is small with tile floors, with all horizontal surfaces covered with boxes of food and medicine and fishtanks, but somehow it is wonderful. They have a little Dog, whose name I will Anglicize to “Sean Jean,” who is possibly the perfect Chinese apartment dog. He’s small and about half of him is taken up with fluffy hair, with a little pug face. We found ourselves at home right away. Da’s uncle, who worked in the government before he retired, seems to be a legend of a man. He quickly proceeded to take us out on the town and get a little taste of local food.

The restaurant we went to was across the street, but it took ages to get there. We sauntered along the sidewalk, even over the road amid oncoming traffic, at a snail’s pace. It took ten minutes to cross the street and get to the restaurant on our block. Da caught up with his family prodigiously. It was hot and humid outside, and other people were walking as slow as we with tank tops and shirts rolled up. I suppose this is Beijing.

We got to the restaurant and Da’s uncle, true to form, insisted that we take a private room in the back. I left the ordering to Da and his family; clearly I had no place trying to do anything in a country where I understand about three words. We ended up with quite a spread: roast lamb on the leg, chicken, fish, blood tofu soup with intestines, egg soup, cabbage, the fatty bacon pork meat and more. It was great, if a little different. The blood tofu took a little while to get used to; it was especially strong. I had a hard time with the fish and all their little bones. Da’s uncle ordered each of us a bottle of Chinese beer and a bottle of Chinese spirits to share amongst the four men at the table. Every so often, for no apparent reason, Da’s uncle would raise his glass and say “Gu Bay”, which means “cheers” in Chinese, and we’d clink our glasses. The spirit was sweet and strong. The beer, especially the Beijing beer, was light and slightly metallic, very refreshing. The food revolved around a large revolving glass in the middle of the table. We were encouraged to eat as much as we could. I was in heaven.

I now also know how to speak one of my first Chinese phrases. Da translated for his uncle when he asked us how we like the beer we were trying, especially the one from Beijing. With encouragement from Da, I put my arm on Nil’s back and said, “Wu-

men aiy Beijing pidj-eo.” (“We love Beijing beer). It was a big hit, the first time I said it. I suppose I ran it into the ground a bit repeating it for the rest of the night, to whomever I saw.

We left the restaurant slightly drunk, very giddy, and very, very full. I now understood why people walk so slowly in Beijing. While Da went off with his family Nils and I came back upstairs to Da’s uncle’s apartment. We were both very, very tired, and I passed the time by trying to construct buildings with Mao Jung characters. Da eventually came back and we played a bit of one-card poker using the tiles as chips. By about 10:00 Da and I were exhausted, and Nils had been passed out for hours. We got things set up in the bedroom in Da’s uncle’s place and found the bed. I find that beds here in china, like furniture in general, is a bit lacking on the “give” property that I’m used to. The bed in the room was nothing more than a box of wood with a foam top beneath the sheets, but I couldn’t have cared by that point. We lay back and we were each too tired to say a word.

And thus concluded our first day in Beijing.

Arrival in Beijing

18 July 2008

Yesterday I travelled from Oxford, England, to Beijing, China. These are my impressions.

First of all, I like to think that yesterday was a bit of a tour de force with some of the ‘great’ world airports. First was London Heathrow. Heathrow is the busiest, most important airport in what was, as recently as 100 years ago, the most powerful nation on Earth. (Is it still the busiest airport in Europe?). It’s not as impressive as you might think. I’m sure that the English weather doesn’t do much for the impression that it gives. I woke up at my house in Oxford. It was cold and cloudy, forecast for heavy rain. The bus ride went through the grey landscape. The first stop on the bus route is Terminal 5, the latest and greatest piece of British air infrastructure completed in the last decade (I won’t even mention its disastrous opening last March in this blog). Given what I’ve seen of airports, and especially given my current surroundings in Beijing, Terminal 5 seems a bit over-hyped. It is small. This must make for closeness to terminals. Never having travelled through there (thankfully, given its short, disastrous history), I can’t be much of a judge. It basically looks like a smaller version of the Denver International Airport. The bus then wound its way through the back streets of Heathrow, small alleys which ran along stretches of barbed-wire chain link fence with hangars and trolleys on the other side, roads which the general public is not allowed to use. Finally one reaches the great destination that it the Central Bus Station. From here one walks through a food court and down a ramp to the passages that take you to Terminals 1, 2, 3 and 4. I followed the signs to Terminal 3, checked in, and made it through security. Immediately through security, literally inches from the fold-out chairs (which I think I recognized from Argos) that the BAA has provides for travellers, one finds oneself in the Duty Free shopping. I bought a bottle of single malt scotch for my Chinese hosts and proceeded to entertain myself in the terminal. In all Heathrow Terminals it is impossible to know which gate to go to until it is nearly time to board. So one makes do with the diversion which is provided: shopping.

There are shops everywhere in Heathrow Terminal 2. The planners certainly had no regard for travellers when building the place. The ceilings are low, the waiting and rest areas are in the middle of the corridors (which one would expect to be set aside for walking), and shops abound. Duty free shops, clothes shops, several WH Smiths. The food court is upstairs, with one grotty airport pub and an overpriced sandwich bar engulfing the space which belongs to Café Nero, whose line was out the door. Here the airport planners nearly tease the customers, providing a large south-facing window looking down from the food court. This would be nice if there were anything to see besides endless grey sky and the occasional plane floating by. I decided to go for a two pound sandwich from WH Smiths, which was highly unsatisfying. I checked my internet for the first time in days at one of the booths which was provided. Finally the gate number for my flight displayed, I walked there, and I milled about until I was permitted to board the flight for Frankfurt.

And then I flew.

Frankfurt airport was my second airport impression of the day. I have to be absolutely fair and say that the weather in Germany was no more complimentary to the general mood than the weather in England. More grey skies, but at least there were pine trees and a nice city skyline to see from the window as the plane came in for landing. I generally curse Frankfurt airport. They have separate security checkpoints for each bundle of gates, which is annoying. Even if you have a connecting flight, they will scan your bag and make you dispense of any liquid you might be carrying. This once cost me dear; I had bought a bottle of vodka duty free at Heathrow, which was confiscated before I boarded my connecting flight in Frankfurt. True, I did open the seal and use it to mix a bloody Mary before landing, but at any other airport this would not have been an issue. It taught me a lesson, and today my scotch stayed safely in its sealed duty free bag. But they still asked to inspect my bag after having it go through the x-ray machine; the grubby German man running his fingers along the seal of the red duty-free plastic bag. The whiskey made it through in my safe hands.

I mainly slept in the Frankfurt airport. I had a layover of nearly two hours, so I got to my gate and stretched out. Before I knew what was happening I heard the gate steward announce the final call for passengers on flight 720 to ‘Peking.’ I ran. I made it.

I don’t think the sun ever really set on our plane. We were travelling so far north, above Siberia, that the sun just seemed to get lower and lower on the northern horizon, but I don’t think it ever quite set. Every so often I would look out the window to see where it was. When the stewardesses instructed people to shut their window shades it was just low enough to make twilight behind the clouds to the far north.

I slept pretty well on the plane, as well as one might expect. Having the seat next to me vacant was nice. I woke thinking that I would look out the window to see darkness. When I opened it just a crack a blinding stream of light shone through. I immediately shut it again. The sun must have been due north for that to happen, for it to be right on level to shoot through the plane like that. Another passenger a few rows in front of me had the gall to open his and leave it open; a stewardess had to ask him to close it because it was blinding the people on the other side of the plane.

I love window seats, because I’m mesmerised by whatever I see below me. Most of the time it’s only clouds, but there was some good stuff about two hours before landing. The ground was brown and barren. If I hadn’t known we were flying over east Asia I wouldn’t have doubted somebody telling me that we were flying over the southwest of the US; it looked so similar.

With about half an hour before landing the landscape got a bit greener, with more signs of human existence. Then we went through some puffy clouds and never really came out. Even when we were clearly descending we were still thick in the clouds; you could see the wisps of moisture shooting over the wings as they extended and curled, the signs of approach. And then, suddenly, we were over what was clearly China. We were over green fields dotted with the occasional warehouse. We were over little green trucks driving on motorways that had blue signs. I presume the directions they give must be in Chinese; I couldn’t see them clearly. When we broke the cloud, or the smog I presume, we were low, probably 1000 feet maximum. It didn’t take long before I was looking down on what I presumed must have been the new Beijing International Terminal, which I had read about and was excited to see.

In contrast with the other two airports I had seen in the past 24 hours, and really in contrast with most of the airports of the world, Beijing terminal three looked really special from the air. From a distance it looked like some strange boomerang, the kind that you would play with in a park. As we got closer and lower its smooth, almost parabolic (or maybe perfectly parabolic) ceiling became prominent. There were triangular skylights that stuck out from the smoothness and stuck in the air, all in the same direction. It was almost as though some giant ninja had just hurled a bunch of his ninja stars, and they had all stuck in the roof with the same incidence and uniformity. It was cool.

I only really realized how large the plane was, despite seeing that it had an upstairs for first class passengers, when we touched down on the runway. You can usually guess when the plane is going to touch down; I guessed completely wrong today. I had expected that we had a few more seconds at least to float down when suddenly the landing gear banged against the tarmac. It was relatively smooth, and a good deal of the people in the back of the plane started cheering. I don’t know if this is a Chinese tradition, a German tradition, or if some people were just taking the piss.

I got off the plane and expected to have a long walk through some nasty corridor to a central immigration office, as one usually finds in airports. In Heathrow you walk for what seems like miles through a labyrinth of corridors, steadily getting more crowded as more and more tributaries lead into the river of immigrants. Finally you find yourself at the fluorescent delta that is immigration control. In Heathrow this means more serpentine lines, low ceilings, and nasty, surly officers behind glass cages. It was not something I looked forward to.

The Chinese do things a bit different in their new airport. I got through the ramp and found myself in a large, open area. The ceiling was several stories high and a cool breeze was running through. This was not some separate herding zone for international arrivals; this was a proper landing gate. It was separated from the departure zones not by a glass wall, but by a balcony overlooking the first floor. Within minutes I had arrived at the immigration desks. The lines were long but steady-moving. The ninja-star skylights allowed for plenty of natural light (or what could be had, given the smog and overcast skies), and a fountain in the courtyard below provided the ambient sounds. Cool breeze abounded; fluorescent lighting was nowhere to be seen. There were smiling Chinese faces sitting behind colourful Beijing 2008 tables, providing pamphlets on the Olympics and the airport. My immigration officer was a bit slow and meticulous, which concerned me as I didn’t know the exact address of Da’s relatives in Beijing, but soon I was stamped through with yet another mark on my ever-filling passport. Each officer had an electronic panel opposite their desk, facing the customer, which had four buttons: one green of a face with a wide grin, another green with an ambivalent smile, one red with a slight frown, and another red that looked downright angry. These would blink after the stamp was put on the passport; I assume they were for customer satisfaction. It seems a dangerous thing, if as an immigration officer you are judged by the happiness of the people you allow to pass through your desk. Aren’t these people there to make people suffer, as they are in Britain and America? Despite these doubts, I went with the flow and pressed the button with the wide grin. I assume that this means the same in China as it does in the western world.

I caught the train from one end of the giant boomerang to the other, where baggage claim was located. My bag was a bit slow coming up, which gave me time to look around and think. There is something wonderful about being in a spanking-new airport. Everything is clean, it is recently designed and therefore designed to be bright, and nobody has had a chance to add those after-thoughts that make other airports so unpleasant. Heathrow, in my opinion, is an amalgamation of afterthoughts. If it wants to keep up, somebody should just destroy the whole thing and begin afresh.

One thing that was interesting, partly spectacular and partly concerning, was seeing some of the airport staff on inspection. I first noticed this while I was waiting for my bag in the baggage claim line. Upstairs, through the glass, was a brigade of about twenty Chinese in white and blue uniform, standing at a sort of relaxed attention with their hands behind their backs, looking forward to a superior and standing in lines. I don’t know what the point of that was. I later saw the same thing near the departure check-in zone. These people are ready for the Olympics in a big way. They do not mess around.

I got through customs, exhausted, and needed a place to rest. There is a Starbucks coffee on the ground level, right outside the meeting point, where I sit now and intend to use as a chill zone until Da and Nils arrive. I ventured upstairs to see the continuing grandeur of the whole place. When I asked at the information where the nearest food was, the polite Chinese woman answered, in respectable English, that I could find a McDonald’s only fifty meters down the hallway on the left. Clearly, as an American that is what I was after. Though I am tempted to see what the Golden Arches have for the Chinese palate I wanted to aim a bit higher for my first meal in China. I didn’t have to look far before I found, in a special fourth floor that was also host to a Burger King, a Korean Restaurant and a foot massage parlour. I settled for the Chinese equivalent of American fast food, serving pork and cabbage in doughey little rolls. I bought three and a cup of iced tea for 15 yuan, or just over one british pound. Considering that this is the airport and prices are considerably higher, I think that I’m going to like eating out here.

I’m stuck in the airport, effectively grounded until Da and Nils arrive, but I can tell already that this is going to be an incredible trip. I have no doubt about it. The sights, the people, the new feel of being in a new place, a new country, a new continent, and in many ways a new world is exhilarating. There are barely any smells here in this climate-controlled, beautiful though slightly sterile airport, but those that reach my nose are enticing. I cannot wait to go from here out onto the streets of Beijing, see the city for what it is, live it, breathe it, feel it. I want to know it for as much as can be known in three weeks. I want to take it all in with a slurp of noodles and miso soup. And I’m doing it with a great friend and guide. How can this trip not be spectacular? I have high hopes, but they are the right kind of hopes: to explore, to discover, and to grow. How can that not happen in a place like this?

I am of two minds as far as being here so close to the Olympics. On the one hand, this is spectacular. The Chinese have been building up to this for seven years. All around me are posters and signs, all around me are people in track suits with fliers and pamphlets. On a screen behind me, which I can see through the reflection of a six-storey window that looks out onto the great bubble and garden that is the car park, flash images of people playing soccer, fencing, enjoying moments of triumph and heartbreak. There is a recurring video of a woman training for table tennis. How cool would it be to see a table tennis competition in this country? Everybody speaks English, everybody is polite. Even as I was going downstairs and outside for a breath of fresh air, waiting on the escalator ramp, the woman ahead of me (who had no official status and who spoke in broken English) asked me where I was from, where I was flying to, and what I would be up to. She insisted that she write down the name of her town, Guilin, so that I could ‘google’ it and pay a visit. It was worth a visit, she said. How often would that happen in America, or Britain (ha!)? People seem friendly here. It’s like it’s been bred into them.

On the other hand, it most likely has been bred into them. I’m get the impression, and I can’t wait to talk about this more with Da, that people here have spent a lot of time and had a lot of encouragement to be extra nice during this, their most glorious summer. This airport is new. Beijing is cleaning up. Factories are closing down to enhance the air quality. There are smoking bans in public places this summer. Everything will be new, sparkling clean, like this airport. Part of me almost wishes that I could see the real Beijing, the one that wasn’t putting on a show for the world, the nitty gritty side of it all. I’m sure there will still be plenty of that to be seen, but it will inevitably be hard to tell what is real and what is put on. I guess I’ll just take whatever this city can give me.

Still, this is a wonderful time to be in Beijing. This is a city and a country which, in my lifetime, will come to international prominence. I may look back on this trip and think that this was my time to see things before they got really out of control, before China really took over. This may be a trip to look back on someday. Which is why I intend to take and keep as much of it in as possible.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Time for some more dumplings.

Final score: Beijing Terminal Three- 1. Heathrow- 0.