Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Well we made it to China! I'm laying here on our bed four days in, as we were descending down to the Beijing airport we could see the city and absolute grid pattern of the city, we couldn't see any individual looking buildings. Each building was in a group of at least ten identical buildings, it was very organized and militaristic looking. Going through customs was breeze, but trying to communicate that we needed a hotel for the night was not! Once we finally found the desk in the airport and pointed to some different brochures we figured out prices and if they had internet or not. We needed the internet to get ahold of sam, the contact at our school, so we could tell him we made it and that we would be in shijiazhuang the next day. So we were taken outside to a rickety van that had a lot of chinese characters all over it and "100% perfect hotel" written across the top. It wasn't the most comforting message. Getting to the hotel was quite a ride through narrow streets and alleyways but we made it. The chinese really seem to love this one image of santa claus because we have seen this one version on almost every hotel and many stores, they have large pictures and smaller pictures attached to each other like a happy birthday banner. When we got to our room we immediately fell down onto the bed, that was a bad idea. The beds here are extremely hard and my back is still sore from sleeping on them but I am hoping my body will adjust soon. We found that there was actually no internet at this particular hotel even though we had paid an extra 100rmb to stay at the hotel with internet. The picture on the wall was crooked and the shower was just a shower head, a curtain, and the bathroom's slippery tile floor. We went to bed about 6 Beijing time and woke up around 2. We were able to doze a bit until around 5 when we decided to hop on the next bus back to the airport to try and figure out how to get to the west train station. Once we got to the airport we had our first meal in china, consisting of dumplings, coffee, some type of shredded and flavored carrots, some cold sliced meat, and a scary looking brown slimy ball we later found to be an egg. We realized that we could get internet at the airport after all using Boingo, something andy had paid for a couple months ago to get internet at airports in the united states and it turned out it worked in beijing too. Many places here, like the airport and mcdonalds, have free internet, but you have to have a phone number to put in and they send you a password through sms. So with some emails sent to our parents and Sam we went to try and find the bus that would take us to the train station, with a little work and a couple trips up and down the stairs we found the right line and got right on. We had been warned earlier that the bus wouldn't take us right to the station so we weren't too surprised when we got off in a parking lot with only sky risers in sight. Fortunately there were quite a few chinese on the bus and most headed in one direction so we took there lead, about a five minute walk later we came to the station and headed in to try and find our tickets. After a change in the teller to one who spoke more english we got it across where we were headed and that we wanted to leave today, however we did not get across which class we wanted tickets for because once we pushed ourselves along with the throng of people shoving there way to the train we realized we were riding in first class, unfortunately our tickets ended up being in two different carriages even though our seats were 64 and 65. So after we had two hours of being stared at separately we got off of the train in
Shijiazhuang.
I have to study a bit of chinese now before my next class so I will have to finish the story of how we arrived later today, thanks for reading!
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