East is Relative

Leaving Shimen, Beijing via Xi’an

I had fully intended to write long posts about everything that’s been going on, but it really has been the most hectic crazy time of my life. I’m going to try and give you the shortest version possible.

I left Shimen on January 29th after my last classes. I spent the last week in class asking my students to think about what they wanted to accomplish with English one year from now. We took pictures, and we listened to “Dangerous” by Michael Jackson, a song they’ve been talking about all semester. I tried to convince them that there are much better MJ songs, but they won’t have it.

I took a train to Changsha, and on the way, spent time with a very talkative young boy (who spoke no English and seemed not to be bothered by the fact that I don’t speak much Chinese), and a very shy young girl. I gave them English names (Lily and Toby) and Toby and I messed around with my iPod Chinese dictionary so we could half-communicate. It was quite a fun ride (but my head hurt at the end). I took a train to Xi’an from Changsha, and met up with my friend Laura at our usual Xi’an hostel. We spent a few days deliberating our decisions about teaching, staying in China, etc. You already know what my decision turned out to be.

On Feb. 3rd, I left Xi’an on a sleeper train to Beijing, and I arrived really early in the morning on the 4th. I met my friends Donovan, Sarah, and Taylor for lunch and to drop off one of my bags with them so we wouldn’t have to check it into a Beijing train station for a week. For dinner, I met up with a fellow China blogger, Fred Dintenfass, who took me to a really awesome Yunnan restaurant. The food was fantastic and the company was great. It was nice to make a new pal, too.

In the morning on Friday, Feb. 5th, I went to meet my parents at the Beijing airport, and they brought my younger brother Josh with them. This was supposed to be a surprise, but in actuality, my mom had slipped a few weeks ago and I’ve been telling everybody that I thought they were going to bring him. I had become quite the conspiracy theorist about it, reading between the lines on everything they were saying for the past few weeks while we made plans. But despite the fact that I knew he was coming, I was no less thrilled to see all three of them come through the International Arrivals gate. We got on the Airport Express subway line back to the city and we were off.

Once in the city, we dropped off our bags at the train station (we were leaving for Harbin that night), and headed for Tiananmen Square. We met up with a guy from our travel agency at a hotel, exchanged money for some of our train tickets, and then headed to the Forbidden City. It was really awesome to check out all the buildings (which are in much worse repair than I thought they’d be). It was pretty awesome to be in all the same places the various emperors since the Ming Dynasty had wandered about, especially since I’ve been reading up a bit on Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who was essentially imprisoned in the Forbidden City for a while by the Chinese government after the end of the Qing Dynasty.

After the Forbidden City, we took some tuk-tuks (essentially motorcycle rickshaws) to one of the hutong because I wanted to show the area to my parents. I told the guy we had 4 people, and he told me Y20. When we got out, however, they tried to charge us Y20 per person, which of course was nonsense – I had already bargained him down from Y40 and I had specified we had 4 people. So I got into a huge argument in Chinese with these two drivers who kept trying to drive in front of us to stop us from crossing the street. Eventually, since I had already paid him the Y20 we agreed on, we just crossed the street away from them and went into the hutong, and they left. I was so angry because I have never had a taxi driver do that to me in the six months I’ve been here. I’ve been overcharged for sure, but the hutong where we were going would have been Y10 in a regular taxi; Y20 for two tuk-tuks was even an overcharge. I couldn’t believe how stupid they must have thought I was, even though I spoke Chinese. I think I was angrier at that driver than I was with the 2-week process of sending money home through the rural Postal Savings bank in Shimen, and that time I had been pretty upset.

Anyway, it all boiled down to a lot of stress for me and the family. Josh was feeling really uneasy because people were staring at him a ton (after all, he’s almost 6′ tall, pasty white, and has red hair and a long beard – not exactly your typical foreigner), and the tuk-tuk drivers had been driving crazily against traffic, and then I had gotten in the argument. All of these things combined to make him and my parents really anxious. We ended up walking to a bank near the hutong to get some money, walking around one of the parks near the hutong, and then hailing a cab to the train station. Things were really touch-and-go at that point. On top of the previous anxiety, we were supposed to get on a sleeper train to Harbin that night, and our train tickets weren’t all in the same car, so Josh and my mom were going to be in a cabin with strangers (and Theo and I would each be by ourselves in a cabin with strangers). Obviously, that’s something I’m used to, but they’re not. We decided to give it a shot anyway, though.

During the anxious part, we decided to get some western food so everyone could have a little comfort, and I broke down and ate McDonald’s. That’s right, I broke my no-McDonald’s-in-China pact. See how much I love my family? And everyone is right – it tastes almost exactly like McDonald’s at home. We’ve eaten at McDonald’s several times since then. Oh, well.

Stay tuned for the next part of our trip: Harbin!