Arrival in Beijing
Trip Start
Aug 01, 2005
1
89
141
Trip End
Dec 15, 2005
Beijing, Beijing, China
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Once the train arrives, I get off and moving into the exit hall. The exit hall is one gigantic herd of people. They've optimized the hall in Beijing for such large groups by changing the stairs into long ramps. All I can see around me is people, people, people. The weather today in Beijing is what would probably be called really crappy. The entire city is covered in a thick fog, which is probably exacerbated by smog. It's overcast, and slightly chilly. All I have to do is think of how much I sweat standing still in Malaysia, and the day seems like the best day I could ever hope for. Knowing where I am going, I deflect all the touts and head north up some street. On the train, I thought it would be Monday before I could finally get my hands on some kind of ice-cream oreo dessert. Unlike HongKong and the rest of the world, none of the McDonalds in China have the "Oreo McFlurry" item available. It'd been a sad couple weeks without my dessert. I about fell out of my shoes as the first thing I saw on the street was a DQ. LoL, screw McDonalds, I've found the good stuff. It's 8:30am on a chilly October morning, and I'm spending $1.50 on an Oreo blizzard. I feel like an alcoholic buying a beer on Sunday morning after St. Pat's. It's a spectacular dessert, and I head on up the street to my hostel amongst the Hutong districts.
My hostel is in the Shijia Hutong, one of innumerous one-storied grid-like residential areas that fill Beijing up. I don't even check the place over as its a IYH and recommended by Zoran, the Croatian from Nanjing. After getting cleaned up, I head towards the nearest Internet cafe on my map to start my search for a future job here. Amazingly, Beijing has the most marked buildings I've ever seen. Each shop has a consistent red sign giving it's full address. Well, this said, the address corresponding to my cafe was no longer a cafe. So, I head to the second one, about a kilometer away. I have to walk through a couple Hutong districts to get there. It's a mostly quiet street with mostly small alleyways and restaurants on the sides. At one point there is a gateway indicating the entrance to a private Hutong where only residents are allowed. I guess too many tourists and thieves wander in there otherwise.
I make it to the cafe and am surprised once again that the workers all have a basic understanding of English, at least enough to have no problem explaining what is going on. After spending some time configuring my laptop for their system (which was amazingly easy, the girl even knew which screen to bring up for me to copy the addresses down from their computer), I settled down into a big couch for the next 6 hours to search, search, search. I circled many times through many websites gathering as much information as possible and sending out dozens of emails to local universities and recruiting places. I even manage to talk to a couple of recruiting people using instant messages. Surprisingly (isn't everything surprisingly or amazingly? I guess if it wasn't, I wouldn't mention it), one of the recruiters said they had a job in FuZhou that would pay me Y15,000 to Y20,000 (somewhere around half of what I was making in the USA) to teach computer science classes. Wow, that would be insanely cool, except I want to work in Beijing. Hmm, still it sounds too good to pass on so I may find out more about it later. I got one reply saying they had no positions for Beijing, and another reply saying that they wanted English majors to teach English, but they would be interested in my teaching computer science classes. Clearly, I've been searching for the wrong teaching positions. Tomorrow I may start searching for CS teaching opportunities.
It's growing dark as I leave the cafe and the manager recommends I go see Tiannamen square at night. I head in that direction and stop by a few stores along the standard "pedestrian mall strip". I find a huge bookstore with more books than I can handle in languages I can't read. I do find a copy of "The Jungle" for Y25, so I grab it for the airplane ride to Sydney this weekend. Around 7pm, I reach the "Gate of Heavenly Peace" with Mao's famous portait hanging in front. I wonder if someday there will be another big confrontation right in the spot I am standing under Mao's portait. Only time will tell. I wander through the gate, and then back out to go check out the square. In the underpass, I find guard blocking the entrance. It seems that the square closes sometime before 7:30 and so I have to walk along the adjacent street looking at it. It is rather large, but I have a hard time believing it's the largest public square in the world. At the end, I decide to try out the subway system.
The Beijing subway is without a doubt the most laughable subway system I have ever encountered. They don't have ticket machines, because they don't have machines that read tickets. Even though it is a flat fee of Y3 to ride the subway, you must buy a paper ticket from a desk, and then hand it to another person who is waiting at the entrance who tears it in half. I somehow hope that they have some kind of drastic improvement on the way before the Olympics or else the city is in for a large embarassment. The train's are rather ragged, but they work. It's really the ticket counter that blows my mind. I would have never guessed that any subway in the world had less than even a basic token/turnstile system, let alone a city hosting the Olympics less than 3 years.
Oh well, back at the hostel, I've written up the last two days events. Tomorrow I plan to hike back to the cafe and continue my search in the morning. I hope to actually visit some local universities in the afternoon to see what kind of situations I may be getting myself into come springtime.
