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.