I've Overcome the Firewall

Which means it's time for me to recount what's happened while I've been in Beijing!  I landed here on the 19th and was immediately frustrated by the lack of access to internet at the airport which made it difficult for me to contact people from UCEAP (the study abroad program) and to tell my family I had arrived safely.  Accessing wi-fi entailed walking throughout most of the airport to find a little machine which scanned my passport and gave me log-in information which I would need after waiting a good fifteen minutes for my phone to connect to the network.  I only tell this story because, looking back, it was my first encounter with the many layers of Chinese bureaucracy which exists here.  Much of the past few days has been about learning to meet the right people, ask the right questions, and read all the fine print to make sure I'm not missing out on anything important.  And I haven't even begun to touch on the class registration process or what it was like to find a good cell phone plan to use.  Its been a little overwhelming for my brain which is a bit slow in Mandarin and just coming off a sluggish 2-month vacation, but I am contentedly enduring these trials nonetheless, knowing this whole semester will be an experiential learning process and a surefire way to kick my mind back into shape.

Thankfully, there are little things which make me feel at home in Beijing.  On my first night, I went out to find dinner at a nearby fast food place and ordered these noodles which had a 麻辣spice in it which I love and am never able to find in the states.  It gives your tongue a numbing spicy sensation and is ubiquitous in the cuisine here.  And then I went to a convenience store at the global village which is where the international student dormitories are.  There, I found 旺旺牛奶, my favorite type of milk which also can't be found in the states.  Little things like these made me weirdly excited about being in China.

First meal.

旺旺牛奶。First drink.

The next day was orientation and registration.  I'll spare you the details of that since they're mostly logistics which I'm no good at remembering anyway.  Most of it involved lots of listening and waiting in line.  On the 21st, we woke up early in the morning and had a Chinese placement test to determine our classes.  Later in the evening, I met up with a friend who flew all the way from XiAn to welcome me to Beijing.

At the east gate which I will walk through every day on my way into campus.

中关新园 zhongguanxinyuan The buildings where international students and scholars live.

She took me out every day to enjoy more good food and visit places I had not yet been to in Beijing.  We visited 南锣鼓巷nanluoguxiang and 王府井wangfujing.  南锣鼓巷nanluoguxiang is a more traditional looking street in Beijing that's full of delicious street food, cute stores with cute Asian things, and tourists.  王府井wangfujing is the street in Beijing notorious for weird street foods like deep fried scorpion and tarantulas (none of which I ate) along with large shopping malls with name brand stores (none of which I shopped at).  It was great fun to catch up with an old friend, see interesting things, and be forced to use more Chinese.

火锅 Hot Pot

Skewers of candied hawthorne are a Beijing specialty.

Squid at 南锣鼓巷

This is a part of 王府井wangfujing.  Yes, that stuff on the very left is starfish. More pictures of creepy things to come in my next post.

The glamorous part of 王府井wangfujing.

Okay, now more about the nitty-gritty things.  Besides walking around Beijing, I've also been settling into my dorm and getting to know some of the other UCEAP students.  It's been fun to see everyone's different reactions to things in Beijing since a lot of us have gone out to explore together.  We're a pretty diverse group.  Some of us have lived here and others are in Asia for the first time.  I haven't gotten to know all of them very well yet, but it will be interesting to see how social dynamics play out.  On occasion, I meet people from other programs and countries, but the way our living situation and programs are set up makes it difficult to do so.  I also hear there will be a good opportunity to meet regular Chinese students when classes start and clubs start tabling.  So at this point, I can't really foreshadow what my social relationships will be like with people here though I'm trying to keep an open mind when meeting others.  

And though I genuinely do enjoy new experiences like this, there are still little things about being in an unfamiliar place which make life more difficult than it would be in the US.  The class registration system and other logistical things are always unclear.  (I will never complain about telebears again.)  Most of us find things out through the grapevine.  Air pollution irritates my throat and the cold weather makes my nose runny.  There are also a lot of things which feel uncertain about the coming semester like figuring out who I can trust here, what things to commit to on my schedule, what goals I can realistically aim to achieve, etc.  I'm actually kind of looking forward to having class start tomorrow so I can begin to know more of what this semester will look like.  More to come!

I'm in Beijing!

Blogger is blocked in China and the VPN installed on my laptop isn't working. :(. Fortunately, it's working on my smart phone so I can put up some picture here of what I've been up to in Beijing for the past few days. Sorry, no captions since it's too hard to do on the mobile app, but much of it is self-explanatory!

Transitioning Again

Since I lasted posted on here, I have spent more time with family, eaten more good food, visited some tourist attractions, and said goodbye to my mom. :(  

Bye Ma!

I also visited Hong Kong's Wikipedia page to find interesting things to share on this blog post.  (I swear I'm a creative person.)  Some fun facts:

Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world.

I took this horizontal panoramic of the most vertical city in the world at 太平山(Victoria Peak). 

#instagram #victoriapeak #hashtagsarepointless #whyamidoingthis

We ate at the Peak Lookout which is a famous, touristy restaurant on the Peak. It was Valentine's Day, so pretty much everyone else was there on a date.  Meanwhile, my nephew relishes in his singleness and carrot sticks.

Fish and chips at the Peak Lookout.

Just to make you jealous.

Again.

There are nine public universities in Hong Kong, the oldest of which is the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

A friend of mine who is a student at HKU gave me a tour of the campus. These are some Korean tourists occupying the main entrance.

While on campus, I met my friend Sun Yat-Sen.

They have these colorful cubicles in their libraries along with some very studious students.

Hong Kong's steep terrain and extensive trail network with expansive views attracts hikers, and its rugged coastline provides many beaches for swimming.

My newphews.  Ready to go hiking!  We went to a stream pool called Bride's Pool . Legend has it that a bride drowned their on her way to meet her groom.  We just hiked there to barbecue.

Another cute person for your viewing pleasure.

Catching fish in Bride's Pool.  No bride to be found.

Had to have dim sum a few more times before leaving.

So that concludes my Hong Kong trip, probably the most Western place I'll be in for four and a half months.  I got pretty comfortable staying here and going out on my own every day to meet a friend or do some shopping, but alas, my time has come.  Preparing to leave for temperatures below freezing and record-breaking air pollution makes me shudder a little.  And yet, the thought of adjusting to a new place to face the challenges which come with it fills me with a sense of exciting uncertainty.  I'll be meeting the other UC students from my exchange program tomorrow and moving into my dorm while learning to read personalities and developing first impressions of them.  Mandarin with a Beijing-er accent will be spoken everywhere and I won't be able to avoid it.  But first, I should start packing.  Sound familiar?

Also, my grandma knows kung-fu.

恭喜发财！

Youth can not know how age thinks and feels.  But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.  --J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

While in Korea, I experienced a lot of generosity from friends and strangers who hosted me even though I don't have any kind of familial, let alone ethnic or cultural, ties with them.  In Hong Kong, I'm hosted by blood relatives who've known me before I was even born.  These extremes have made me think a lot on the nature of hospitality, how it feel different when we're receiving from our family.  And since the Lunar New Year is about relatives gathering, I've also been able to experience a lot of the changes in my family.  In the states, I occasionally hear about a relative here or there who passed away or a new one born.  Finally seeing them in person makes me a little nostalgic.  As much as my relatives boss me around and bring up shame-inducing childhood memories to tease me, I sometimes still wish I could live in Hong Kong and be around them more often.  Not to mention all the extra red pocket money I get for being here. ;)

My cousins are popping out so many nephews I lose track of them sometimes.  This one is really into the paper plane I made for him.

HK style milk tea.  One of my favorite things.

Having New Year's Eve dinner with a small fraction of the family.  Didn't want to disturb the good meal to take a good panoramic.

汤圆tong yuen is like a rice cake stuffed with sesame paste which we have for dessert during New Year's.  Though in my household, I probably ask mom to make it at least once a week when I'm home.

The Cantonese are into a New Year's Eve tradition called 行花市 hang fa sze where hordes of people stay up late to go to a flower market where hawkers yell out their good deals on flowers, New Year's decorations, and other useless things.  I had never experienced it before, so I woke up my mom and aunt in the middle of the night to take me to this one.  It was crazy in all the ways I was warned it would be.

The best part of my 行花市hang fa sze experience was probably having 糯米糍 lok mei tse.  It's kind of like 汤圆tong yuen but with sesame coating the outside of the rice cake.  Maybe I've been having too much rice cake.

We got us some flowers!  Hopefully it was worth the loss of sleep.

This is one of my aunts, 萍姨 Ping Yi, in all her New Year's glory.  Ping Yi was born with achondroplasia and epilepsy and is unable to walk due to falls which paralyzed her legs.  We picked her up from her disabled persons' home to stay for a couple nights for New Year's.  I remember being a kid and wondering why Ping Yi and I were the same height even though she was my aunt.  Now, my other aunts are old enough and I'm able-bodied enough that I got the job of carrying her whenever she needed to leave the wheelchair.  Oh...how time changes things.

盆菜poon choi (upper left) is a traditional Cantonese dish eaten on special occasions like New Year's and is basically an amalgam of different meats and vegetables mixed in a bowl. We had it the first night of the New Year.  There's supposed to be a lot of cultural symbolism involved in its preparation, but I'll leave that to Wikipedia.

We're playing 麻将 mahjong, don't mess.

My first time meeting a second cousin!

More food, because I can.  This meal cooked by my great-aunt.

More of the nephews I can't keep track of getting a kick out of Agent Dash. No need for legos or stuffed animals these days.  The iPad is taking over.

I just really like this picture.

Today I went to the Tai Po Waterfront Park and biked along the waterfront behind my cousin and her son.

And my uncle bringing up the rear.

The view from the waterfront.

There's an anti-corruption hotline!  Wonder if I can call from the mainland.

I have quite a bit of free time here, so I subscribed to the trainchinese app to try and prepare for my language placement exam at PKU.  It's surprisingly addicting!  And effective as well.  I think a new era of Chinese school is upon us.

Hopefully I'm not boring you precious blog-followers of mine with pictures of food and family.  Realistically though, those are the two things being in Hong Kong has been about, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  Even though Hong Kong is still very much a foreign place to me, there are so many ways the culture and people in this city help me understand myself.  I can look at the way my aunts take care of my aging grandparents or how my cousins raise their children and think about how future family life might be like for me.  At the same time, I can look out in the streets from the 35th story apartment I'm staying in and imagine what the past here might have been like for my parents.  There are so many things I'm going to miss about Hong Kong, but I still get to be here for another week!