"Not good" was my first thought. Yet somehow this mass of people manages to navigate around you when getting off the train, do not step on toes, get on and off the train in an organised manner. This must be the best crowded metro in the world. I wiggle my way towards the door before my stop (feeling clumsy with my big school bag), get off, find my way to my interlink train with help from the excellent sign posts that are everywhere, large in size and impossible to miss. One can't get lost on this metro.
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| This picture is taken on Saturday afternoon when the train is less packed. Still a lot of people but much less than weekday rush hours. |
I arrived in Beijing on Saturday night of 19th July. The plan is to spend three months here to fulfill one of my long term goals: To learn to speak and read mandarin - writing will be a bonus. I have been postponing taking up Chinese now for much too long.
I have been working for 10 years now and deciding to go to Beijing, be a student again and live with a Chinese family was an exciting and scary decision. I only speak a few phrases of mandarin and I can practically recognise no characters at all. I'll be illiterate, with next to no spoken language skills living in a Chinese family somewhere between 3rd and fourth ring road. Yet, I'll be able to spend 3 months here, visit all the historic sites (already signed up for a Great Wall trip!), learn a new language and make a lot of new friends. Hopefully the family will not hate me - or try to feed me pork (the only thing I don't eat is the favourite food for many Chinese).
THE APARTMENT WE LIVE IN
My taxi driver drops me off somewhere nearby the apartment building, and I meet my new "landlady" and her two "sisters" (I think they were actually colleagues - still not quite worked that out yet). She had clearly mobilised some helpers to meet the new foreigner. My new "mother" is 13 years younger than me, is married with one child (daughter, 2 years old) and also her mother lives in the apartment with us. I was given the nicest room in their modest flat, shown around, fed some healthy vegetarian food and then she had to go back to work. Fine with me, I'm rather tired after the journey.
Here are a few pictures of the apartment:
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| My desk and the "aircon" unit. The fan/aircon kind of works - but you need to put ice inside in the evening to cool the air down. A very basic cooling system! |
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| Something tells me they've given me the room where their 2-year old daughter normally sleeps... |
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| Behind the kitchen sink is a mess of water pipes and handles that need to be turned in the right position every time before having a shower to enable the hot water. Took me a couple of attempts to get it right. |
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| Unlike Europe, on this side of the world the water pipes are always outside the walls. I guess that makes them easier to fix - but also more of a hazard. |
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| I even had a gold fish in my room when I first moved in. It lives in a plastic 2-litre water bottle. Or lived - it died after a few days because the family forgot to change its water... I hope that was not my responsibility! |
THE SCHOOL
I signed up with one of the absolutely greatest private language schools in Beijing, Live the Language, and in my first week I have not needed to regret the decision to dish out a little extra money for that private school experience. I received help with directions and airport pickup from the school, an invite for two school outings already before starting the course (the first one was on my first Sunday - before I had even attended any classes!) and an amazing, fun and thorough introduction to the basics of spoken and written mandarin from my two native teachers, Helen and Felix. I learned more mandarin with Live the Language in a week in Beijing than what I ever managed in 8 years in Singapore. I only have 3 students in my beginner's class - that feels almost like 1-on-1 tuition!
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| At the school lobby area after class. |
FUNNY TRANSLATIONS
Another one of the first week encounters: funny sign posts and bad English translations. Hey! I came here to learn mandarin so this will only motivate me to learn more. I'm wondering if my mandarin will still sound as bad to them after 3 months as these translations...
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| In Taiyangong park there is a small sign that bans ice skating. The biggest reason for my amusement wasn't even the English language. They keep the sign here year round, so it was here also in the middle of the summer when it was over 30C warm... |
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| I think this restaurant had used some automated translation to translate the names of their dishes to English. Some came out rather funny. |
THE ONLY SIGHTSEEING DAYS:
Tian'anmen square on Day 1 after school and Forbidden City on the first Saturday.
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| Tiananmen square really makes me think I'm in a communist country. They have big square, grey buildings, a mausoleum for their former leader Mao, guards that stand pencil straight and don't move and statues of the brave people who worked oooh-so-very-hard to make China a great country. A bit grim, I'd say. |
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| Going to the Forbidden City in July on a steaming hot day is NOT a good idea. We still managed to enjoy some of the views of the buildings, admire the architecture (although for the untrained eye all the halls looked the same from the outside) and as I just had to try on on of those Chinese costumes I managed to get my picture taken by a huge number of people passing by. White people get asked for pictures all the time anyway, but a white woman in a Chinese Empress dress. Completely irresistible for the snap-snap-snappers. |
All in all, it's not that intimidating here. Beijing is awesome. Food is good, plenty to see and people are friendly. They speak just about enough English that with a dictionary and some signing I can find my way round - and the less they speak the better because that definitely motivates me to learn more Chinese!
In any case, now I need to finish, because my otherwise lovely host family seem to have forgotten they were supposed to make me dinner. I think at 9.30pm it's a fair assumption on my side that they are not planning to feed me today. So I'll need to go look for a restaurant instead of a home cooked meal.
