First impressions

The past thirty-six hours have been a crazy blur of traveling, meeting new people, seeing new things, and getting oriented and disoriented (simultaneously). I guess it would make sense to start with my exciting, thirteen hour red-eye flight over to Beijing:

I slept. The person next to me also slept.

I know, my life is wild. Here's how it went down: I was in the window seat, a young Chinese lady was in the aisle seat, and the middle seat was empty. As soon as the plane took off, she lifted up the middle armrest and proceeded to lie across the two seats with her feet toward the aisle and her head resting on my own armrest. I stayed awake long enough to be mystified by this behavior, and then I knocked out as well until we landed thirteen hours later. My camera was in the overhead compartment, so no pictures unfortunately. Just use your imagination.

It turns out several DSIC people were on my plane, and several others arrived in the wee hours of the morning like I did, so there was an early pickup for us at Beijing airport. While we were waiting for the teacher to arrive, I reviewed Colloquial Chinese. Fun times.

The bus ride to Capital Normal University was slow and uneventful (Chinese rush hour, anyone?). Once we got there, we paid a deposit fee of 300 yuan (about 45 USD) and received our room assignments and keys. I didn't know it at the time, but the program never assigned me a roommate, so I'm living alone in a double right now, and it's pretty sweet. It remains to be seen if they'll move someone else living alone into my room. Anyway, I forgot to bring a towel from home, so after getting settled in, I went down to the convenience store with a couple other Yalies and bought a towel, then took a nice, hot shower. One major difference between showering in China and showering in America is that there's no such thing as a "stall" in China--there's just a section of the bathroom with a drain, curtain, and showerhead. I quickly learned that this means the entire bathroom floods if the water is on full-blast. Good thing I brought slippers.

Everyone who arrived early ate lunch with the teachers in the restaurant/cafeteria downstairs, and then we went on a quick tour around campus. Afterwards, a few of us ventured off on our own and did some cell phone searching/grocery shopping. I bought water, another towel, and a delicious pound cake. Dinner was Peking Duck (北京烤鸭), and it was as delicious as everyone had led me to believe. Hooray. After returning to campus, I was pretty jet-lagged and tired, so I pretty much went straight to bed. (But not before helping Peter Lu set up his blog--check out the link in the sidebar!)

Then today, I woke up at 6:30 am (jet lag helped), showered, and grabbed breakfast downstairs before heading over to the language labs to take the placement exam. It was hard. Like, really really hard. I felt like I deserved to be placed into first year after finishing it. Fortunately, the program only offers second year and above, so I should be okay. It actually made me sort of excited, since I saw how much I'd be able to improve in the span of two months. After the exam was the program orientation, which honestly didn't give us any new information (except maybe that the weekly food allowance would be 350 yuan, though I still have no idea if that's a lot or a little). We ate a pretty tasty lunch at a nearby restaurant, then most of the students went on the tour that I had gone on yesterday. I'll be going to "check" my placement result in about half an hour, after which I'll probably head out to find dinner with friends somewhere. I hope we don't get lost in the streets of Beijing.

So, going back to the title of this entry. The first thing that I noticed about Beijing was definitely the air pollution. As a native of Los Angeles, I'm not unfamiliar with smog--in fact, just before I left, the smog got particularly thick for unknown reasons. However, the pollution here is on a whole different level. The sky is literally not visible, and even nearby campus buildings are often obscured. It's hard to believe that the people who live here have to breathe this air their entire lives.

Another thing I've noticed is the rain. I don't know if it's natural or if it's the government seeding the clouds with silver iodide, but it rains frequently and heavily here. I normally don't mind rain too much, but because I brought my huge DSLR, I can't really take photos outdoors unless there's a pause in the downpour. (Though that's not why this entry has no pictures--the internet here is currently just too slow to upload anything.)

Finally, there is an incredible number of Korean nationals at CNU, doing either DSIC or whatever other programs there are here. It's a very strange feeling being in the elevator with people who are speaking what I think is Chinese, and then realizing that I understand what they're saying because they're actually speaking Korean. I guess that'll be happening a lot less often once the language pledge begins.

Anyway, sorry about having so much text with no pictures. I'll upload them as soon as I find a better connection. Wish me luck exploring the city tonight!

Edit
Interestingly enough, it appears as though sometime between last night and this afternoon, the "*.blogspot.com" domain was blocked by whoever does that stuff around here. Posting and editing are still not a problem, since they're done through "blogger.com"; on the other hand, I now have to use a proxy to actually view blogs (Yale VPN would be preferable, but I can't connect to it for some reason, so I use CoDeeN). I wonder what's going on.