我饿了. That means: "I'm hungry." This was my thought this morning.
Actually, that's not really true. My first thought was "why is the light still on?" Yup, I passed out last night dressed and with the lights still on. Unfortunately, it was only four in the morning local time so I went back to sleep for a couple more hours.
Then I woke up and was very hungry. Granted, I had a bit of left over dinner, a scallion pancake thing, but that hardly held me. So I gathered up my courage to go foraging. Sunny had shown me a market by my hotel, like an honest to God grocery store. I passed by but it looked quite closed so I decided to go back to the shopping area I'd found the day prior.
Find it I did. I also found this big market in a huge warehouse. I wandered around, getting a lot of stares, looking for something that looked ready to eat. It looked like everything was in its raw form so after a few rounds I decided to make my exit. I'll say this: the market had all manner of fresh groceries as well as an ample "stuff" section and nothing quite smells like a Chinese fish market.
I realized that I'm still too nervous to try and get vendor food from this place. There was TONS of food and even more people trying to buy it. I couldn't identify it and didn't want to hold up the line. Fucking Laowai (foreigner).
I made my way back towards my hotel and saw a line forming outside of the grocers so I figured it would open soon. That's when I noticed the cafe. A cafe that served coffee. Score. I went in and simply ordered "coffee" and the woman at the cash register gave me a menu. I saw that they had hazelnut coffee, one of my favorite things, and pointed at that. Hell, it was the same price as the plain coffee (eight yuan) so why not. The waitress pulled out a calculator and entered "8." I gave her a hundred yuan note (the smallest thing I have other than three singles) and got change.
My coffee and I went to the grocery store next door which was already very full and very loud. Seriously, I walked in and took the escalator upstairs and found myself in the produce/ butcher. Everyone was shouting. The butcher, the bakers, the customers, the stocking clerks. And again: nothing here looked ready to eat except some of the bakery stuff. There was a huge line and I didn't want to interfere so I made my way down stairs to the dry goods, stuff, and refridgerated sections. Again, nothing that looked good to eat right away so I snuck out the "Exit, No Purchase" line.
I continued wandering, long since out of coffee, until I finally settled on a street vendor. Despite the warnings of my travel guide to avoid vendors I did the quick check: everything looked clean, a fair few people stopped to place their order before going into the market it was outside of, and the food looked fresh. Also: there was no meat so that was one big risk factor avoided. I stood there and she just started making the... Whatever it was. It was a layer of batter cooked very thin, then en egg cracked in the middle and spread over the whole thing, flipped over, smeared with three of these brownish pastes. She asked if I wanted the red one which looked very, very spicy so I declined. Then a toss of two herbs, one was a mystery, the other was cilantro, some lettuce, and two crispy wontons. Then the whole thing was folded up burrito style. Four yuan.
If you've been keeping track: that's eight for coffee, four for my crepe-omelet-burrito, and then three for the grape fruit tea I bought from the newspaper stand outside my hotel. A delicious, light, breakfast all for fifteen yuan. Less than three dollars. I see why so many people eat out.
Todays agenda: apartment hunting. Still waiting to hear from the guy who's supposed to lead that excursion so I guess I'll just keep wandering.
Here goes nothing.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Eric Vs. Beijing - Round 1 - The Cell Phone
After I got cleaned up in my hotel room my guide for the evening, another teacher from the school named Sunny, took me out to buy a cell phone. Fortunately, my guide has never been to this neighborhood so we decided we would do an exploration.
We took off down the street from my hotel, Motel 168 Super, which is on something of a main road I think. Aparerntly that's not enough to keep a little shopping district at bay. Seriously, like two blocks away from my hotel there's an area with tons of store fronts and street vendors. Lots of people. I actually learned a phrase on the cab ride to my hotel: "人海人山." It means "People Mountain, People Sea." It's a how most Beijing citizens feel about the population. The shops had EVERYTHING. I saw phones and bikes and underwear and flashlights and trinkets and all manner of stuff. Sunny led me into a little store that had cell phones. She told me it wasn't good because they didn't carry famous brands and suspected the phones wouldn't work. I trailed along obediently. It's China and I've been here for like, four hours. I have no idea what's going on.
Anyway, we got a little lost for awhile but everyone she asked for directions was very helpful (I presume) because eventually we crossed a bridge and ended up in front of this gigantic mall. Seriously, bigger than Water Tower Plaza, smaller than Mall of America. Anyway, we found that there's a reputable electronics dealer on the third story and we went up. My requests for a phone were simple: I need an English interface, GPS, and a translator. Basically, I needed a smart phone. I kept picking up phones with a "how about this one" look as I tried to find something suitable and not too terribly expensive. Eventually, and I mean EVENTUALLY, we settled on a Lenovo model that seemed to fit the bill. I thought we were all set but we needed a SIM card and apparently the official ones are really expensive and don't get you a lot of talk time/ data. So where did we go for a SIM card?
We went to the newspaper stand outside of the mall. Yup, the vendor had a blue plastic grocery sack full of SIM cards and a hand written sheet of the available phone numbers. I chose one at random and Sunny was taken aback: I'd chosen a number with two "4's". Very unlucky in China.
CHINA FUN FACT: The word for "four" is very close to the word for "death." It's the same word with a different tone. A number with no fours in it cost twenty extra yuan.
I decided to risk the bad luck and get the cheap one. We took our SIM card and went back into the phone store (where we'd left the phone to charge), handed over the SIM card, and got all set up. This process took about two and a half hours with walking and haggling and generally being confused. That's a long two and a half hours after a twelve hour flight.
As it stands: I have no idea how to use my phone. The interface is in English but anytime I open an app, that menu is still in Mandarin. Sunny! Help!
We took off down the street from my hotel, Motel 168 Super, which is on something of a main road I think. Aparerntly that's not enough to keep a little shopping district at bay. Seriously, like two blocks away from my hotel there's an area with tons of store fronts and street vendors. Lots of people. I actually learned a phrase on the cab ride to my hotel: "人海人山." It means "People Mountain, People Sea." It's a how most Beijing citizens feel about the population. The shops had EVERYTHING. I saw phones and bikes and underwear and flashlights and trinkets and all manner of stuff. Sunny led me into a little store that had cell phones. She told me it wasn't good because they didn't carry famous brands and suspected the phones wouldn't work. I trailed along obediently. It's China and I've been here for like, four hours. I have no idea what's going on.
Anyway, we got a little lost for awhile but everyone she asked for directions was very helpful (I presume) because eventually we crossed a bridge and ended up in front of this gigantic mall. Seriously, bigger than Water Tower Plaza, smaller than Mall of America. Anyway, we found that there's a reputable electronics dealer on the third story and we went up. My requests for a phone were simple: I need an English interface, GPS, and a translator. Basically, I needed a smart phone. I kept picking up phones with a "how about this one" look as I tried to find something suitable and not too terribly expensive. Eventually, and I mean EVENTUALLY, we settled on a Lenovo model that seemed to fit the bill. I thought we were all set but we needed a SIM card and apparently the official ones are really expensive and don't get you a lot of talk time/ data. So where did we go for a SIM card?
We went to the newspaper stand outside of the mall. Yup, the vendor had a blue plastic grocery sack full of SIM cards and a hand written sheet of the available phone numbers. I chose one at random and Sunny was taken aback: I'd chosen a number with two "4's". Very unlucky in China.
CHINA FUN FACT: The word for "four" is very close to the word for "death." It's the same word with a different tone. A number with no fours in it cost twenty extra yuan.
I decided to risk the bad luck and get the cheap one. We took our SIM card and went back into the phone store (where we'd left the phone to charge), handed over the SIM card, and got all set up. This process took about two and a half hours with walking and haggling and generally being confused. That's a long two and a half hours after a twelve hour flight.
As it stands: I have no idea how to use my phone. The interface is in English but anytime I open an app, that menu is still in Mandarin. Sunny! Help!
Journey to the East
Holy Crap. I'm in China.
I know this was to be expected but it's sort of a big deal for me. Anywho, taking it back to the start.
I left my house in the states at 5:00a.m. and went to the airport. It took a little bit of wandering around to find the right terminal: my Air Canada flight was being conviently operated by United. Whatever, my bags were RIGHT up to the limit (really, one bag rang up at 50lbs), and accepted with no hassle. I said "good bye" to my step dad who'd been kind enough to help me get checked in and carry the "oh shit, we're overweight" duffel bag. From here, it was on to SECURITY!
Which also went shockingly smooth. The didn't even need to look through my carry on. I'll spare some of the details. Really: the first leg of my journey went thusly: sit around terminal playing gameboy, four and half hour flight to Vancouver, I tried to sleep but couldn't so I just watched the inflight movie stuff. Once we landed in Vancouver I rushed through customs, ate my last hamburger for awhile, and repacked my carry-on so I could transfer some of my stuff out of my back pack. Then I got on the twelve hour flight to China.
That's a long time to be on a plane. But, I got quite lucky really. I was next to one of the very few other westerners on the plane. Her name was Kate, a Candian grad student pursuing her PhD in Chinese Architecture. She's going to be in a village several hours south of Beijing doing excavations. So we got to chat intermitently between our movies. There were a lot of movies. I watched: The Avengers, Adventureland, Some Modern Family, Falling Down, and Pirates (the claymated one, which I slept through). Three disapointing meals and four complimetary Heinekens later we landed in Beijing. The whole thing was a non issue. I made it through customs with no hold ups. Found all my luggage, was met by my school at the airport, and whisked into a taxi and taken to my hotel. It was a long, hot, slow drive through the crowded city.
This is about when I noticed that Beijing is HUGE! Like, Chicago is big but the tall buildings here seemed to just keep coming. I think most of them are apartments but I'm not sure. Most look oldish or run down; like they were built in a hurry.
There's a lot to take in. More than I was able to in my sleepy, jet laggy state. But there's much more to come.
I know this was to be expected but it's sort of a big deal for me. Anywho, taking it back to the start.
I left my house in the states at 5:00a.m. and went to the airport. It took a little bit of wandering around to find the right terminal: my Air Canada flight was being conviently operated by United. Whatever, my bags were RIGHT up to the limit (really, one bag rang up at 50lbs), and accepted with no hassle. I said "good bye" to my step dad who'd been kind enough to help me get checked in and carry the "oh shit, we're overweight" duffel bag. From here, it was on to SECURITY!
Which also went shockingly smooth. The didn't even need to look through my carry on. I'll spare some of the details. Really: the first leg of my journey went thusly: sit around terminal playing gameboy, four and half hour flight to Vancouver, I tried to sleep but couldn't so I just watched the inflight movie stuff. Once we landed in Vancouver I rushed through customs, ate my last hamburger for awhile, and repacked my carry-on so I could transfer some of my stuff out of my back pack. Then I got on the twelve hour flight to China.
That's a long time to be on a plane. But, I got quite lucky really. I was next to one of the very few other westerners on the plane. Her name was Kate, a Candian grad student pursuing her PhD in Chinese Architecture. She's going to be in a village several hours south of Beijing doing excavations. So we got to chat intermitently between our movies. There were a lot of movies. I watched: The Avengers, Adventureland, Some Modern Family, Falling Down, and Pirates (the claymated one, which I slept through). Three disapointing meals and four complimetary Heinekens later we landed in Beijing. The whole thing was a non issue. I made it through customs with no hold ups. Found all my luggage, was met by my school at the airport, and whisked into a taxi and taken to my hotel. It was a long, hot, slow drive through the crowded city.
This is about when I noticed that Beijing is HUGE! Like, Chicago is big but the tall buildings here seemed to just keep coming. I think most of them are apartments but I'm not sure. Most look oldish or run down; like they were built in a hurry.
There's a lot to take in. More than I was able to in my sleepy, jet laggy state. But there's much more to come.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Updated my "Prelude" Page
HEY!
Yeah, you there! You should totally check out the "Prelude" page at the top. I decided to keep that separate from the actual flow of posts so it's easy for people to find after I start filling this blog up with content. Looking forward to comments.
Enjoy!
Yeah, you there! You should totally check out the "Prelude" page at the top. I decided to keep that separate from the actual flow of posts so it's easy for people to find after I start filling this blog up with content. Looking forward to comments.
Enjoy!
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