Arrival in China

My flight from Los Angeles to Beijing took 12 hours. Luckily I sat with two very nice girls from Ecuador who kept me company when I was awake. They spoke english and mandarin fluently, and wrote down a few chinese phrases to help me get started in China.

We landed in Beijing at 4am China time. The airport was enormous and very empty. There were no agents at the domestic transfer gate until 5:30, so the other foreigners and I wandered around for the first hour trying to figure out where to go to make our connections.

Best sellers at the bookstore across from gate 31

While I waited for my connection to Xi'an, the stories I had heard about chinese hygiene were confirmed. I watched a man in an expensive suit lean against a pole in the middle of the hallway and hock a loogie for five minutes. By the time he was done there was a noticeable pile of spit in the middle of the airport. I will spare you the photo.

As the sun rose I could see that the airport was blanketed with a think layer of smog that obscured most of the airport from view. The smog made it almost possible to look directly at the sun without burning through your eyes. Here are some pictures of the airport to give you an idea.

Outside gate 31 waiting for the bus to our plane

Planes on the tarmac

You can barely make out the buildings across the runway

Our plane took off at 8am. Our two hour flight to Xi'an included a hot breakfast, a blanket and a pillow (all I got on my four hour flight to Los Angeles was a bag of pretzels and a water). There were noticeably fewer foreigners on this flight, and when we arrived a the airport there was noticeably less english. I was picked up at the airport by my supervisor Vivian. The ride from the airport to Siyuan University was about an hour. The level of smog in Xi'an was comparable to Beijing. What I could see out my window impressed me. We drove by a nuclear facility that had at least eight cooling towers. There were several spots along the highway where a dozen or so high-rise buildings would sit surrounded by farms (soybeans I think) and other low density land uses.

High rises in the 'middle of nowhere'

All of the high rises in this picture are under construction

Etiquette on chinese roads is very different from america. Our driver used the left lane to speed as fast as he could. When he caught up to a vehicle in front of him he honked repeatedly until it moved out of our way. Sometimes the vehicle would ignore his honking and we would weave through the other lanes to get in front. I say vehicle because most things on the highway were not cars, but rather some form of truck that does not exist in america. There were a few trucks that had three wheels. There were also honda's and chevy's on the road that look just like they do in america.
When we got off the highway and onto local roads, the driving conditions became markedly more dangerous. Drivers on the road ignored the lanes in order to bypass slower traffic. Our car spent about a third of its journey in darting in and out of on-coming traffic. Most of the slower traffic we were bypassing on the local roads were bicycles and farm machinery (i think), but there were also pedestrians crossing the road, including children and the elderly.