Arriving in China

Once apon a last month, I went to China.

Actual friggin’ China!

To be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve been anywhere where I felt so lost in terms of language, as well as technology. Having a smartphone with access to maps, money and messaging makes international (particularly solo) travel a breeze, but going to China is a bit of a steep learning curve that involves getting to grips with the Chinese equivalents of your standard apps.

Having said that, everyone was very kind and helpful (especially to the lost looking white woman wandering around), and it was very nice to be in a place that finally matched my own personal appreciation of Dragons and Dumplings.

(Ok, this one might actually be a lion)

I arrived in Beijing airport after a twelve hour overnight flight and plus seven hour timewarp, feeling pretty groggy and disoriented. Luckily, the airport was filled with helpful security waiting to intercept the foreigners and guide them into the right places (first for fingerprinting, then for immigration). So all up, getting out of the arrivals was easy.

But getting to the hotel was another thing entirely.

I’d booked a taxi transport to the hotel to make things easier, so there was supposed to be someone waiting with my name.

There was not.

I walked through the arrivals section slowly, looking around like a meerkat on speed. No ‘Tegan’.

So I spent the next half an hour trying to work out what was happening.

One of the problems is that once you’ve exited arrivals, you can’t go back in to look around again, so I was effectively trying to look for my name from ‘behind’ the people who was theoretically waiting for me.

I was pretty much the only white person, so at a certain point I just started wandering up and down looking lost, hoping the taxi driver would take the opportunity to approach me.

I used the wifi + a vpn to get to my gmail to double check the meeting point. The driver had arrived, and should have been waiting for me at arrivals.

I walked back and forward a bit more, trying to look for my name and demonstrating my lostness.

When that didn’t work, I went to Information. There was a language barrier, but she talked into her phone and it asked me what I needed in English, and I said that my driver was here but I couldn’t find him, and I couldn’t call him because I had no phone connection. (My colleague had told me that the technology these days was basically full on Babelfish, and it was ideed pretty impressive to see it face to face for the first time.) She pointed me to a phone box, I tried calling the driver, had a conversation in Chinese where I kept saying my name and ‘Information’ in the hope that this would translate for him to come pick me up at the Info desk (knowing full well that ‘information’ is not ‘information’ in Chinese), and then had to apologise a lot and hang up the phone.

He did not come for me.

I wandered around looking lost and trying to peer at the people waiting to see if anyone was looking for a white woman for a bit more.

Contemplated my options, and first decided to go back to the Information desk. This time, the same woman saw her colleague across the hall and beckoned for her to come. The colleague spoke English well, and could understand that I couldn’t speak any Chinese, so made the phonecall for me, and I finally saw a man hurrying towards us with a phone to his ear.

And then I was in a taxi going to the hotel!

The driver was quite nice, but did first try to tell me that I had probably exited the wrong way (I didn’t) and then told me that he had been there all along but maybe when I took a while to come out he had got tired and had a little rest on some seats (all of this using the babelfish). I smiled and nodded and said it was fine and tried not to fall asleep in the car. Probably what had happened is that I came through too fast: I don’t carry luggage with me most times, so if immigration is speedy I can be out of an airport in 10 minutes.

Anyway.

About an hour later I was in my hotel, and the lovely people at reception let my try out Alipay (they app that you use to do EVERYTHING in China), which worked successfully. LEVEL ONE UNLOCKED.

The hotel was pretty posh by my standards, but also had some shiny novelties on top of the more classic style, including these claw machines where you could pick yourself up a fluffy moutai for your child (moutai is an insanely alcoholic drink).

There were also small robots moving around the hotel (they could even call the lift!), which were being used for deliveries internally, but also (I think), for people ordering food from outside to the hotel.

Personally, I was convinced – based on the facial expression – that they were at least slightly evil, and the fact that one of them blocked me from getting into the lift at one point did not help this feeling.

I showered and rested for a bit, and then decided it was time to try to find some food.

I headed out of the hotel, and wandered a bit aimlessly, with the belief that if I walked for a bit I would probably run into some food.

And I did!

By some random chance I stumbled into a food court at the base of a skyscraper, filled with at least 10-15 different stalls. After a quick peruse, I opted for a plate of dumplings, which cost only about 3 pounds and were being freshly made and boiled in front of my eyes.

I used the very well known ‘pointing at the picture’ method of ordering, and the man at the stall rang them up and handed me a receipt.

Except then when I tried to pay with Alipay it didn’t work.

I stared a bit at the man, he stared a bit at me and said something. I looked confused.

And then a nice man who had just ordered his own dumplings took pity on me, used my Alipay to pay himself, and paid for my food with a different App.

I asked him how to get that app and he kind of laughed and left.

Turns out I was in the private foodcourt for a large Chinese Company, and only employees should be eating there.

But I GOT MY DUMPLINGS.

LEVEL TWO UNLOCKED! (with the kindness of strangers)

After my meal I walked around a bit, looked at some shops, and worked out how to buy water and fruits, as well as some special sweets- all using the Alipay App, which I think puts me at level THREE.

Beijing is famous for its Hutongs- small alleyways filled with restaurants that pop up everywhere and have amazing cheap food. I wasn’t quite brave enough to go in (and had just gorged on dumplings), but kept a note for later adventures.

The next day was filled with Work and Rest, so I mostly only have some shots from inside the hotel:

Dumplings for breakfast are pretty good. Bittermelon sucks. Coffee at Chinese hotels in my experience tends to be awful.

On the Friday, I went to visit some scientists, and unlocked LEVEL FOUR by successfully taking a DIDI (Chinese Uber) Using the Alipay App.

There was a bit of stress involved- the traffic jumped up in the 5 minutes I took a shower, so suddenly I was worried about being late- and when I got in the taxi, the man asked me for the code to confirm I was the right pickup.

Which I couldn’t find anywhere on the app! Queue frantic pressing of random buttons and a lot of apologising. This was a weird one- communication wise- because I knew what he wanted, theoretically, but I couldn’t actually work out where to find the numbers.

He pulled into a driveway, beckoned a young person over, and she translated that the numbers were the last two numbers of my phone number!

And we were off!!

The scientific visit was great- mostly because the main scientist I went to see was doing really cool work, and everyone in her group seemed very motivated and happy to chat and ask questions.

They also took me to the nearby botanical garden for a stroll, as well as to the seed store, which is one of the largest in Asia. I didn’t manage to take so many photos, because of the chatting, but overall it was pretty lovely.

And afterward, the scientist very kindly dropped me off at the nearby Summer Palace for a quick tourism.

Associated Selfies:

The Summer Palace is a UNESCO site, first built in the 1750s during the Qing dynasty (by emperor Qianlong), then destroyed during the Second Opium war 100 years later, reconstructred by Emperor Guangxu, damaged in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, an restored again in the 1920s for public use.

It was a rather beautiful site to walk around (despite the post-work exhaustion and hot-and-stickyness of it all), but my favorite part was definitely the sheer volume of dragons.

There had very clearly been a decorator-Emperor discussion that went somehting like:

‘Sir, what would you like’

‘I like Dragons’.

‘Ok Sir, we have some dragons. Is there something else we could add to the design?’

‘I like Dragons’

And who is to say he was wrong?

A lot of it has also been restored, so the colors are all quite vibrant throughout.

My colleague told me that there’s a bit of a difference in how old sites are viewed: in europe there’s more of a tendency to keep them ‘as they are’, where as Chinese restoration leans more towards ‘as they were’.

The palace complex is situated over some hills on the edge of a lake, so at some point you can walk downhill, and hit a nice strolling area on the water’s edge.

There are also some more buildings to admire, with quite beautiful painted roofs, and- of course- MOAR DRAGONS.

Some of the dragons even come with cats:

It was also cool to see an appreciation for rocks– the one on the left is called the ‘fungus shaped rock’….

… plus a big shout out to the trees that don’t even have to bother holding their own weights.

I exited the palace feeling pretty exhausted, and had to take a little break by the side of the road to drink some water and rest a bit (it was HOTTTTTT, and humid).

I contemplated just going back to the hotel to sleep, but I was sooooo close to another big sight to see.

So I gathered myself, hopped in a Didi and made my way to the Birdsnest:

Quite pretty, and good to see in the evening all lit up.

Small montage of random shots:

The street nearby has some snack stalls and tourist stalls.

Two new cultural sensations: a lot of stores were using some kind of dry ice to advertise their cold drinks (which led me to think the drinks were colder than they were). And a lot of places- including tourist sites- had these kind of automated megaphones shouting a message on a loop.

I bought a weird wooden massage comb thing, and also opted in for one of these small things that I thought would be a milk-based drink but was actually a rather sweet and quite thick yogurt.

I slurped it up and put the container back (I assume they reuse them), and headed on my way.

Past the Giant Moon:

And then I used the Alipay ticket app to take the subway home!

CHINA LEVEL FIVE UNLOCKED.

(I want to mention here that in Beijing and Shanghai at least the subways were VERY well marked. It’s worth downloading two separate apps that help you navigate, because I couldn’t work that out via alipay itself, and applemaps is useless. But all up, a joyful, airconditioned experience.)

My final levelup of the evening was a decision to eat at one of the Hutong stores for dinner.

I initially pointed at the 18 yuan noodle dish that looked a bit like dandan mien, and also at some dumplings. The man said something and I couldn’t understand it, but it seemed I was not getting my dumplings.

(My suspicion is that you either take the noodles OR the dumpling, and he didn’t really understand why I would opt for both. Or maybe they just ran out of dumplings, it was pretty late by then.)