I'm in China!!!

So I may or may not finish with my explanation of where I was before I left for china because now I am in china! Below you you will find out what is up so far.

So I am not going to dance around it, my trip started off a bit bumpy and it was my fault. For some reason I was set, for several weeks, that my flight out of Seattle left in the afternoon. When I checked my flight numbers one last time just after noon, to my surprise, this was not so. In reality my flight out of Seattle had left… without me… at nine that morning.

I would still be kicking myself, but it worked out. I went to the airport and, after calling the airline for my connecting flight in Vancouver I learned that it had been delayed by six hours due to weather in Russia. So I bought a flight to Vancouver and made the flight with plenty of time. Thank you freak Russian snow storms!

My flight from Vancouver to Beijing was eleven and a half hours, so it always helps if the person you sit next to is nice and willing to converse. Luckily mine was. He was named Francis was from Hong Kong but had moved to Canada in his teens. He was probably in his fifties and liked to talk. We talked about China a lot. He traveled here every two or three months for a few weeks at a time for business and has seen a lot of the country. The time flew by, pun intended, and before I knew it we were in Beijing.

We landed at 11:30pm in Beijing and everyone who had connecting flights had missed them, so the airline herded us into shuttles to take us to a hotel. I say herded because they would not tell us when our flights were the next morning and all of the actual airline desks were closed so there was no way to find out. Once arriving at the hotel, around 1:30, we were told that we needed to be back on the buses by 5 the next morning. People were not happy to hear this, so unhappy actually that I saw my first argument in Mandarin. Imagine one airline representative against fifty disgruntled airline passengers of which at least 15 have circled said airline representative and are all giving him their piece of mind at the same time. The amazing thing is that after about 5 minutes of this nothing had changed and we went to our rooms as if nothing had happened.

I shared a room with Francis, who I had met on the airplane. We had been sticking together since disembarking because we had guessed that we would have to share a room. I have to thank Francis because he argued with the desk attendants at the hotel to allow me to keep my passport on me. They had insisted that they needed to keep it at the desk while I stayed at the hotel and I knew better, but arguing with someone who you share only 20 words is rather difficult. After a minute or two of exchanging mandarin words aggressively, they made a copy of my passport and his identity card and returned them to us. Then we went up to our room and promptly went to bed with our alarm set for 4:40.

At 4:15 we got a call from the front desk. The airline attendant had told them to call everyone and tell them to get down to the lobby by 4:30 to board the buses and go back to the airport. Following Francis’ advice, we took our time and they called twice more before 4:30. We went down to the lobby at 4:45 to find that most everyone had the same idea. Then we were rushed back to the airport to wait for half an hour for the airline desks to open. Then I waited for another 2 hours for my flight at 7:30.

Since I have arrived in Harbin Jason and I have not done anything extremely exciting. I was exhausted from my lack of sleep the night before so we did some shopping and eating and low key activities.

I know that there will be an overwhelming amount of differences between China and what I am used to and for at least the first few weeks I am going to try to make of list of them.

1) Many things here are given cartoonish qualities, often related to cartoon renderings of animals but not always. For example our broom is all pink and in the cast plastic there is a smiling face that is topped with glue on eyes.

2) Pedestrians have all of the right-of-way that they want as long as they can make it across the street before the car that they just ran in front of hits them.

3) Drivers are very space aware and will test such space awareness in many ways. Such as: following other cars by inches, missing pedestrians by inches, and squeezing between cars with inches divide by two.

4) It is okay to stare. Especially if the person you are staring at is white and wears funny clothes. It is also exciting to talk to said white person. The staring will take time to get used to, but the second part is great because everyone is super friendly and more so after they learn that Jason speaks their language.

5) There is no such thing as waiting in line. If say you want to check out in the US you would hop in line after the last person. In China, there is a person at the register and who ever is at the counter gets to check out. So if get in the back of the line you are missing that there is a lot of space between you and the person at the register and it will take you a while to check out.