Beijing Day One: You could make a filament, or a ballast keel, or self-tanning cream, or...
I spent the previous night in the Bangkok Airport Hotel (Novotel), which is very, very nice. In keeping with the general theme of my trip to Southeast Asia, the hotel lost power for a couple of hours in the evening, but they gave us free sushi and sashimi to make up for it (and it did). Great place. I woke up early and took their shuttle to Suvranabhumi Airport, passed through customs without a problem, and got on a Thai Airways flight to Beijing.
The flight was about 5 hours and passed uneventfully until the very end. I had thought there was a problem with the plane because we started descending, and yet I couldn't see Beijing out the window. We were very low, it was a clear day, and yet all I could see was grey land in all directions. Then suddenly we were almost on the ground, and I realized: That's not grey land, it's smog. There's so much crap in the air that you can barely see the ground. Sure enough, we landed with no problems in Beijing's Capital Airport.
I had made arrangements to rent a studio apartment for a few days (http://www.hw-ielts.com/apartment.htm). The guy who owns it, Kelvin, met me at the airport.
First impression: It's really, really cold. OK, I've been living in Cambodia, where it's 80 degrees every day, and I'm coming from Bangkok, the hottest capital city in the world, but Beijing isn't just temperate, it's freezing. It's well below zero when I arrive, and I had no winter clothing of any kind. Appropriately, given his name, Kelvin drives with the window open.
Second impression: There's a lot of traffic. Kelvin tells me that it's a twenty minute drive when there's no traffic, but it takes us more than an hour. The apartment is fine--a bed, a bathroom, and a door that locks. My first (and most important) mission is to locate a winter coat ASAP. Fortunately, the apartment is a few blocks from a mall, which is good, because by now it's dark and freezing out. I put on a couple of sweaters and shiver my way over.
The mall, I think it's called the New World Center, is just like any mall in the United States--big, fancy stores, a food court, some restaurants scattered around. There's an ice skating rink on the bottom floor, and lots of people are crowded around watching the skaters. I stop to take a few pictures.
I'm the only white guy in the mall, and the only one within a several block radius, so I stick out quite a bit. This surprised me--of all the places I've been in Asia, Beijing was the one where the people seemed least accustomed to foreigners. Not at the tourist sites, of course, but in the malls and on the streets.
Anyway, back to jacket acquisition. I figure, if it's really like an American mall, there's a bargain store in the basement--and sure enough, I find a store selling big poofy winter coats for 129 yuan (about $15). Bought it and a set of gloves, and back outside.
It's still freezing, but slightly more bearable. I stop to take a photo of the giant pig fountain outside the mall and realize that a) it's hard to take photos while wearing gloves; and b) it's too cold to take my gloves off. So there aren't many photos. Anyway, if you look at the pig fountain, you'll see that there's a small round coin down and to the right of the pig. People try to throw coins through the hole in its center, presumably for some sort of luck.
I want to try some Peking duck (there's a famous place across the street from the mall), but I can't afford it. The ATM at the mall won't give me any money, which is vaguely worrisome. It turns out that most ATMs in Beijing aren't hooked up to international networks, and so foreigners can only use a select few. Instead I wander around the markets a little hoping to find something that looks appetizing, but none of the street food looks good. Disheartened and freezing, I get a quick bite at Pizza Hut.
I speak a little Mandarin. Not very well, and I don't have much of a vocabulary, but I can have simple conversations--ordering food, buying things in stores, etc. Most people I encounter speak English, but it's really amazing how friendly people here become when I say something in Mandarin. The waitress at Pizza Hut was very eager to help me with my pizza-ordering skills.
The language situation in China is very complex. The official language, Standard Mandarin, is the most widely-spoken language in the world (almost nine hundred million native speakers). It's spoken in most of mainland China. The Chinese language most Americans encounter is Cantonese, because most Chinese people who came to America came from non-Mandarin regions (like Hong Kong). Contrary to what I had hoped when I started learning Mandarin, the different forms of Chinese are not mutually intelligible; Mandarin and Cantonese are more akin to French and Spanish than to English and British English.
Mandarin has very few sounds. There's a very limited range of consonants and vowels, and restrictions on how they can be combined. To make communication possible, Mandarin is tonal--a syllable spoken with a rising pitch (as if it were a question) has meaning different from what it would be were it pronounced with a falling pitch. One example is the syllable "shi", which can mean, among others, "corpse", "lion", "rock", and "warrior", depending on pitch (the poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" consists entirely of the syllable "shi" pronounced with different tones, and it has a happy ending--no lions get eaten). Mandarin has five tones, while Cantonese has about nine (which is why Cantonese sounds more melodic).
Written Chinese is fascinating. The characters are thousands of years old, and have not changed much--a literate Chinese person can read something written in 200 B.C.E. with no difficulty (whereas an English speaker generally cannot understand anything written before the 13th century C.E.). Even with tones, there are many homonyms in Mandarin, but there's no ambiguity in the character system. A single word can mean many things--e.g., "wu" with a high level pitch can mean "house", "to plaster", "a witch", "filth", "a crow", "to dig a pond", "to falsely accuse", or "tungsten". This can get confusing. If someone offers you "wu", you want to ensure you're getting a house or some tungsten, not filth. But the characters for each of those meanings are different, so if they write it down, there's no ambiguity.
Cantonese is written with some of the same characters, but many are different. A Mandarin speaker cannot necessarily communicate with a Cantonese speaker by writing (although many Cantonese speakers also speak some Mandarin). By western standards they appear to be different languages, but the Chinese government maintains that they are dialects of one language, presumably to give legitimacy to its hegemonic control over so many disparate peoples.
Anyway, after the pizza I went home and went to bed. Not a very exciting day, I know, but on day two I went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Much better.
The flight was about 5 hours and passed uneventfully until the very end. I had thought there was a problem with the plane because we started descending, and yet I couldn't see Beijing out the window. We were very low, it was a clear day, and yet all I could see was grey land in all directions. Then suddenly we were almost on the ground, and I realized: That's not grey land, it's smog. There's so much crap in the air that you can barely see the ground. Sure enough, we landed with no problems in Beijing's Capital Airport.
I had made arrangements to rent a studio apartment for a few days (http://www.hw-ielts.com/apartment.htm). The guy who owns it, Kelvin, met me at the airport.
First impression: It's really, really cold. OK, I've been living in Cambodia, where it's 80 degrees every day, and I'm coming from Bangkok, the hottest capital city in the world, but Beijing isn't just temperate, it's freezing. It's well below zero when I arrive, and I had no winter clothing of any kind. Appropriately, given his name, Kelvin drives with the window open.
Second impression: There's a lot of traffic. Kelvin tells me that it's a twenty minute drive when there's no traffic, but it takes us more than an hour. The apartment is fine--a bed, a bathroom, and a door that locks. My first (and most important) mission is to locate a winter coat ASAP. Fortunately, the apartment is a few blocks from a mall, which is good, because by now it's dark and freezing out. I put on a couple of sweaters and shiver my way over.
I'm the only white guy in the mall, and the only one within a several block radius, so I stick out quite a bit. This surprised me--of all the places I've been in Asia, Beijing was the one where the people seemed least accustomed to foreigners. Not at the tourist sites, of course, but in the malls and on the streets.
Anyway, back to jacket acquisition. I figure, if it's really like an American mall, there's a bargain store in the basement--and sure enough, I find a store selling big poofy winter coats for 129 yuan (about $15). Bought it and a set of gloves, and back outside.
I speak a little Mandarin. Not very well, and I don't have much of a vocabulary, but I can have simple conversations--ordering food, buying things in stores, etc. Most people I encounter speak English, but it's really amazing how friendly people here become when I say something in Mandarin. The waitress at Pizza Hut was very eager to help me with my pizza-ordering skills.
The language situation in China is very complex. The official language, Standard Mandarin, is the most widely-spoken language in the world (almost nine hundred million native speakers). It's spoken in most of mainland China. The Chinese language most Americans encounter is Cantonese, because most Chinese people who came to America came from non-Mandarin regions (like Hong Kong). Contrary to what I had hoped when I started learning Mandarin, the different forms of Chinese are not mutually intelligible; Mandarin and Cantonese are more akin to French and Spanish than to English and British English.
Mandarin has very few sounds. There's a very limited range of consonants and vowels, and restrictions on how they can be combined. To make communication possible, Mandarin is tonal--a syllable spoken with a rising pitch (as if it were a question) has meaning different from what it would be were it pronounced with a falling pitch. One example is the syllable "shi", which can mean, among others, "corpse", "lion", "rock", and "warrior", depending on pitch (the poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" consists entirely of the syllable "shi" pronounced with different tones, and it has a happy ending--no lions get eaten). Mandarin has five tones, while Cantonese has about nine (which is why Cantonese sounds more melodic).
Written Chinese is fascinating. The characters are thousands of years old, and have not changed much--a literate Chinese person can read something written in 200 B.C.E. with no difficulty (whereas an English speaker generally cannot understand anything written before the 13th century C.E.). Even with tones, there are many homonyms in Mandarin, but there's no ambiguity in the character system. A single word can mean many things--e.g., "wu" with a high level pitch can mean "house", "to plaster", "a witch", "filth", "a crow", "to dig a pond", "to falsely accuse", or "tungsten". This can get confusing. If someone offers you "wu", you want to ensure you're getting a house or some tungsten, not filth. But the characters for each of those meanings are different, so if they write it down, there's no ambiguity.
Cantonese is written with some of the same characters, but many are different. A Mandarin speaker cannot necessarily communicate with a Cantonese speaker by writing (although many Cantonese speakers also speak some Mandarin). By western standards they appear to be different languages, but the Chinese government maintains that they are dialects of one language, presumably to give legitimacy to its hegemonic control over so many disparate peoples.
Anyway, after the pizza I went home and went to bed. Not a very exciting day, I know, but on day two I went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Much better.
posted by arie at 11:21 AM
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