First Full Day in Beijing

Today (Tuesday) was a very full day. I woke up at 4:30 (boo jetlag), and relaxed in my room until about 9:00, when I went to the C-Store to get breakfast. My friend Amanda did this program last year, and she told me to get the grapefruit flavored yogurt, but since I don't know what anything says, I spent a long time looking at the various products that were definitely yogurt before deciding upon the container that had a picture of a grapefruit, a picture of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and a plastic spoon in the lid. I also got a bottled iced coffee. Both items were delicious :) I'm trying to taste as many things as I can that we don't have in the US and I"m off to a great start, even if I don't exactly know what I'm buying.

The entire group met at 9:30 and we did a bit of a walking tour before our orientation. At orientation, we got a history of the university (founded in 1898, 40,000 students, large international population, huge library), instructions for classes, travel, and safety, and then took a group photo. To get to the campus from our dorms, we have to cross a busy road, and Professor Gu's first bit of advice was not to cross the street. There is a pedestrian bridge that we take. The campus is huge! We show our IDs at the gates, and it is like a city inside.

After the photo, I had my first real Chinese food! There was a welcome lunch where there were so many dishes. Speeches were given by many PKU officials about partnership and trading of perspectives, and it was nice to be able to sit and chat with my fellow students. There are 42 of us (official count).

I don't know if I can remember all the dishes, but there was a noodle and seaweed salad, a spicy green bean dish, some sort of sliced meat, a small shellfish (perhaps a shrimp?), two soups (one had noodles the other had mushrooms; the mushroom soup was better), a celery dish, a really fantastic eggplant dish, duck, fish, some meat over squash, squash blossoms, two salads (one was frisee lettuce the other was cabbage), a sweet dough ball, a sweet fried thing, a meat bun, a pot with beef, carrots, and potatoes in a gravy, fried rice, and despite the length of this list I believe there was more. We had small plates, so everyone got to take a taste of everything. It was all delicious.





Meals are served family style with all the dishes on a lazy susan. Diners take from the communal plates with their chopsticks (or using the ladle if it is a soup), and if the chopsticks don't work, there is a soup spoon on the table to help.

After lunch, we walked through campus some more and Professor Gu stopped to talk about various landmarks on campus. We went to the President's house, Nameless Lake, the Pagoda, and the tomb of a journalist who brought about an improved relationship between China and the US. I took lots of pictures.

I'm very ready to start learning Chinese language for real. I've been surviving the shops with "hello" and "thank you," but I need to expand my vocabulary beyond these two words and the name of the university. (ni hao, xie xie, and Bei Da)

A bit before 2:00 we had a short break before meeting our language partners. I checked my e-mail and made a run to the C-Store. At 2:45, we met again to walk over to the meetup with our language partners. It was in an on-campus restaurant, and we first got into groups from our own schools to join with groups from the other school.

My language partner's name is Helen. She is studying International Politics and we bonded over our love of theater. Part of the exercise was to answer a set of questions and then come up with a list of similarities and differences between us, but the best part was that the similarities were many and deeper than the differences we had.

After chatting, we had a dinner with 17 different dishes: two green salads, sliced beef, dumpling, rice, soup, shrimp, beef and peppers, beef and peas, chicken, scallion cake, a meat dish I could not identify, cold noodles, and four others I can't remember right now. I loved everything I tried. The food is spicier, but the spice is very flavorful and doesn't hit you right away and blast your taste buds.

Helen had to leave a little bit early to study for her finals which are tomorrow and the following day, so her friend Eric came over to tag in and hang with me. He helped me get a cell phone, so now I can communicate with the other students on my program, him, and Helen. It's a Nokia brick phone that does calling and texting, and that's all I need it to do. I also bought towels, hangers, and a notebook for class tomorrow.

Eric and I walked around the campus for a little while and talked about Public Health, since that's the program I'm doing and it's his major. It was really fun and interesting to compare ideas and impressions transnationally. One thing he talked about was the condition of the doctor-patient relationship, and there is a similar phenomenon in the US as he observed in China.

When it started to get dark, I went home, put down my things, made another C-Store run for toilet paper and an umbrella, then blogged, showered, and slept.

Today is awesome because it was a full day in Beijing with wonderful people and really great food!