How am I supposed to summarize my first thoughts after living in Beijing, China for 72 hours? This blog post, I guess?

Beijing is a crazy, bizarre, exciting, and beautiful place.

It’s day 5 here, and these 5 days have been chaotic. We’ve apartment hunted, eaten weird things that we don’t know how to pronounce, attempted to read street signs (and failed), gone to the Beijing version of Red Lion, and randomly made friends from Japan and Lebanon. The four most crucial things I’ve learned so far:

1. Food that looks questionable can still taste delicious. (Featured in order: Chinese pastries, sweet whole fish/yellow bean pudding, candied fruit of some sort, pork/Korean pancakes/various appetizers/meat and noodle soup)

2. There is no such thing as an uncrowded street. The population of Beijing is 21 million, more than twice the size of Chicago (and its suburbs). I can expect to see sights like this on a daily basis now, which I’m still not used to (and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be):

3.  The language struggle is real. It is far worse than we imagined. My one year of Chinese won’t get me very far, especially since all I’ve studied is traditional characters–only simplified are used here, making it near impossible to read anything. The language  makes for a totally foreign experience, so incredibly different from those I had in Europe a few weeks ago. But, somehow,the difficulty of it makes it much more appealing. It’s like a language that’s playing hard-to-get, which makes it that much more desirable. Some fancy apartment decor to help with recognition (even though it says extremely basic and rather useless words about the weather and temperature):

4. The Chinese are so incredibly hospitable. I am overwhelmed and cannot come up with the right words to describe this to the correct extent.  Upon arriving in Beijing, a student from our university (who we’d never met) picked us up from the airport, took us out to dinner, ordered everything, paid for our meals, and told us to contact him if we ever needed anything in Beijing. On a separate occasion, the mom of one of my friends from Champaign who lives in Beijing helped us organize our train tickets, delivered them to our apartment, and brought me a giant bag of cookies, despite never having met me before.

Then, to top it all off, is my Tsinghua buddy: Charlie. He was assigned to me through my university here, so on Saturday, he wanted to show me around Beijing for the day. We spent 11 hours together strolling through Beihai Park, ridding in a cart through Beijing’s hutongs, eating SO many amazing meals, bargaining for a cheap bike and then riding around my university, learning how to use the subway system, and visiting multiple palaces and temples throughout the city. Here are some pictures from our incredible day!

This hospitality seems to be characteristic of many Chinese people here in Beijing. From a foreigner’s perspective, it means the world to us! I promised to teach Charlie some fancy English words and common American phrases in return.

It seems as though this foreign place gives you two options: to crumble under the language barrier and sink, or to find your strength in others to persevere and swim. I think I’ll choose the latter.

Only 5 days down so far, and many more to go. But first, the 2 other UIUC student’s and I are leaving for Tibet today! We’ll be traveling by train to Xining, spending a night there, and then taking the train to Tibet–what’s supposed to be the most beautiful train ride in the world. Then, it’s on to Lhasa, Potala Palace, many monasteries and holy sites, and finally, the Mount Everest Base Camp. Tibet is a place that’s fascinated me for years now, so it’s hard to believe that this dream of mine is finally coming true. I’ll even get to celebrate my 20th birthday in this fascinating place, so let the adventures and celebrations begin! TO TIBET!