I'm In China

I have arrived in China. As I'm sitting in my Beijing hotel room at 2:45 am I figured there'd be no better time to start this blog.

I'm not really sure what this blog will be or turn in to, but I figured I'd just throw out my initial thoughts and experiences.

First, though, I'm happy to say that I made a Chinese friend before even arriving. Granted, it was a bored middle school kid who likely wasn't too picky about socializing with me on a long 12 hr flight, but it was still fun. William (my seat neighbor) and a bunch of other students were traveling around the US for a few weeks and were just now heading home. He was excited about his new iPod Touch that he got while there (I also saw several other kids enjoying new iPads). He saw that I also had one, and when I took out my laptop he asked if I could transfer him any games or music. The games wouldn't work, but I was happy to upload some music for him. The two bands he said he liked were Linkin Park and Backstreet Boys. Even though he was impressed with the size of my music library, I sadly have no Linkin Park or Backstreet Boys. So instead I made some judgement calls and gave him a 70-song sampler. I'll just assume that he'll now fall in love with The Beatles thanks to me.

From the airport I took a very long, very expensive cab ride to my hotel for the night. Despite this it was still a nice opportunity to see a lot of the city and soak it all in (including the experience of being stopped directly in front of Tiananmen Square and having Mao's big portrait stare at me for a minute).

Let me tell you something you may not know: Beijing is big. Very big. As my cab driver expertly put it, "Many cars. Many people." A byproduct of this would seem to be the ubiquitous shunning of organized driving. I was forewarned of this by reading other people's experiences, but MAN driving is crazy here. Lanes are only suggestions, as my cabbie (and others) at one point decided that the median on the highway would be a good path. I also don't think I saw one turn signal. I think here the version of a turn signal is to just start turning in front of another car with the assumption that they'll brake. Maybe the craziest thing about driving is the interaction with pedestrians and bike riders. More than once I was pretty sure we were gonna clip a bike, with the bike rider at the last moment calmly glancing over his shoulder to see the cab and make a very slight adjustment to barely miss us.

Once at (this very nice) hotel, my main activity has been sleeping on and off. I'm hoping to be able to sleep a bit more this morning in the hopes that I'll have a somewhat regular sleep schedule here on out, but I guess we'll see how that goes.

Tomorrow I head back to the airport to meet up with the other teachers. From there we take a 5-hour bus ride to Shijiazhuang, my final destination and where I'll be living for almost a year. Once there we start several days of training before everyone departs for their cities. Not sure what the internet situation will be when we initially get there, but I hope to update as soon as I can.

Finally, due to some fancy software, I should have unrestricted access to the Internet while in China. This means I intend to be on Facebook and, of course, continue Tweeting. This means you can contact me a few different ways if so inclined:

Email - evansfavreau@gmail.com
Twitter - EvanFavreau
Skype - EvanFavreau
AIM - EvanFavreau

Oh, and if it's set up right any photos I upload should be appearing at the top of this blog, so you can browse those as well.