Day Two: Up and Running?

Day Two: Up and Running?

Today begins my first full day in Beijing and the true beginning of my summer spent here. I got over the initial jetlag surprisingly well (fingers crossed) waking up at 5am momentarily before sleeping again until 8. Not bad! My rule when traveling is that I am only allowed to sleep on the plane when I would be sleeping in my destination country and though it’s not a perfect science, it’s served me pretty well so far.

First thing, after I went grocery shopping, was going to the police station to “register” me with the local police. The government has begun to really crack down on foreignors staying beyond their visas here which has made for heightened security everywhere. My roommate awoke to the PSB (local police) knocking on her door yesterday morning. Better safe then sorry. I am now a registered temporary resident of Beijing.

Work began today as well. I am in a lovely little area near enough by subway ride (or bike perhaps?) to my apartment and everyone I have met so far is lovely and warm and inviting. Most everyone is a young 20-something and I cannot wait to get to know them, their backgrounds and their ideals better. I spent most of the afternoon “reading” documents for my research and I put reading in quotations because it is beyond difficult to read anything in Chinese if you don’t recognize the characters you are working with. As you can imagine, I am dealing with some pretty specific terminology (not to mention a little jetlag and a cold kindly given from the man in the seat next to me on the airplane) so it took me most of the afternoon to get through an embarrassingly small amount of type. Let me try to explain to you all how one looks up a Chinese character, I will try to be brief and feel free to skip over the next paragraph.

Step one: Realize you don’t actually know the character you see. This sounds easier than it is as many characters look painstakingly similar. I often waste a few minutes looking up characters I think I know only to realize that the dot is a line.

Step two: Find the radical. The radical is the part of the character which is the root of the word itself, there’s really no good explanation for this in English but think the “ed” in indoctrinated. There are over 150 radicals and some characters have a few but they are only listed under one. Good luck.

Step three: Count how many strokes are in the radical.

Step four: Look up the radical based upon the number of strokes. Once you have found your radical you will be given a number assigned to that radical. Go to that section of the dictionary

Step five: Count the number of strokes in the character MINUS the number of strokes in the radical.

Step six: Look under the number of strokes section under the number of your radical. Here you will find the pinyin (Romanization) of your character.

Step seven: Find the character, alphabetically listed and then listed by tone, in the dictionary.

Step eight: Read the English meaning and decide which of the 5 or so options best applies in your case.

Repeat these steps a few hundred times, add in extra confusion for names of places and people and figuring out which characters go together (imagineallwordswrittenlikethisandyoudon’tknowwhereoneendsandanotherbegins) and you’ve got my afternoon.

After work I walked to meet a friend of mine from the program I did here in High School. It is crazy how little I remember of Beijing. I used to bike from my home to school every day for nine straight months and I could not for the life of me tell you how to go any longer. Aside from the fact that the streets are demolished and none of the sight signs exist any longer. Cute cafes, design stores and English signs litter the streets along with HORDES of Laowai (the sorta slang for foreignors word that is used by Chinese in America to basically mean whitey, think gringo in Spanish). Hordes may be exaggerating but I saw at least a dozen today just in my walk, this may not seem surprising but it really was shocking back in the day to see a laowai anywhere outside of jiangoumen (the place where the aforementioned starbucks resided) back in the day. I swear I stare at them more than Chinese people do now. On that note, I am beyond impressed with the expat scene here, especially by what some of my friends are doing, one has opened up a chain of bar/pizza lounges that is expansive, delicious and clearly popular, another just got picked up by a corporation to travel around with a Chinese band, documenting the experience and recently published a book of photographs of the Chinese music scene. It’s nice to look around at your life and think that those who you’ve interacted with are active participants in the world which surrounds you.

And on that note my jetlag just seriously kicked in and I am headed to bed. I am currently reading “Mountains beyond Mountains” which I insist anyone looking for a summer read picks up. I’ve been bugged to read it for a couple years now but ignored those voices (as I so often do) because I feared it would be preachy. It’s actually remarkably engrossing and thought provoking, honest and delightful. Just in case you need something to do when you’re done reading my blog ;)