And so it begins...

I'm in CHINA!!!

The flight here was amazing. Long, definitely. 14 hours - I'm not looking forward to repeating that one on the way back. But it was fantastic because we flew directly over the North Pole. I'm pretty sure not many people get to see the northern most parts of Canada, the polar cap, Siberia, Russia, and the Great Wall in their lifetimes. After Josh's "girlfriend" and the strange girl between us switched seats, we amused ourselves by taking pictures out the window of the cool stuff we were seeing and watching Step Up 2 on our little tv's. The sun traveled with us the whole time, so it was always 2 pm, which was good because we weren't tired when we landed even though it was roughly 2:30 am normal time. Because of checking into customs, traveling to Tsinghua University, waiting for an hour outside the dorm, a welcome dinner provided by our hosts at the University, and exploring basically the ENTIRETY of this enormous place by ourselves for about two hours, I didn't get to bed until 11 pm local time. 29 straight hours of being awake! Yuckkk.

The rooms are a lot different. The other Plus3 trips are staying in hotels, with about 4 people to a room. We each have our own room in a two person suite. Some people, like me, have suitemates that are random international students at the University. There's no one else from Plus3 on my floor even! My suitemate's name is Alice, and she's from Seoul. I told her English was very good but she disagreed, but even so we get along very well. The suites have two teeny rooms with a desk, a tv (I found CCTV in English!), the hardest bed you've ever felt, and a tiny armoire thing; a niche with room for a microwave or something else small; and a strange bathroom. The sink, showerhead, and toilet are all in the same room with the drain on the floor and a curtain between the shower/sink and the toilet. It's the wildest thing I've ever seen.

Beijing is totally geared up for the Olympics. Everywhere, there are electric countdown signs, logos, construction of facilities, cleaning up of the city. Almost every car has a sticker with the logo, and we were able on our driving tour of part of the city to see the hotels they're building (one's shaped like a torch with the wavering flame and everything!), the Bird's Nest - the stadium, and the Water Cube. You can tell the Chinese are putting so much work into making Beijing a good place for people from all over the world to visit. The city is so different from American cities, too. Everyone here rides bikes! We tried to count bikes in the first parking lot, but we realized pretty quick you'd be counting til forever. Rachel, our graduate student asst., also told us that cars, not people, have the right of way in traffic. The cars are so interesting to watch. There's hardly any SUVs, just buses and the occasional van. Every other car is a Jetta, Elantra, Golf, or some other tiny car that gets pretty good gas milage, because there's no room for big cars and gas is arond $5.34 a gallon for #93. Makes $3.59 sound okay, yeah? :)

Our welcome dinner was fantastic but bizarre. The way the Chinese eat formal meals is by placing a number of courses on a lazy susan and everyone just takes whatever they want off of the dishes. The food just kept coming and coming - even our professor couldn't believe they kept bringing out more courses! We had noodles and real Peking duck and beef stew and lo mein and breads and mushrooms and chicken and marshmallow-y things and so much more. Everyone here eats with chopsticks, so we're all getting pretty proficient at them, but it was tough the first meal. After dinner, a group of us went exploring around the University. We kept asking different people for directions - a challenge because it's tricky to find students or staff who speak enough English to both understand us and give us directions that WE understand - and I think we eventually got six different sets of directions to the same place, and none led us to the RIGHT place! But I'd say we got to see a large percentage of campus, and campus here is absolutely huge.

This morning, even though I'd hardly slept, I woke up at 5 am - it's hard to sleep when your body clock tells you it's 5 pm. Hot water doesn't run round the clock here, so I had to wait until 7 to shower, and we met for group breakfast at 8. Getting food at the dining halls is a true adventure here, especially drinks. The staff don't speak English at all, so mostly I just point at something and hope they get what I'm pointing to. I pointed to orange drink this morning at the drink station, but the lady misunderstood and gave me a funny grape juice bottle, which turned out to be a good mistake. After we exchanged currency (a two hour process) at the local bank, I went to the supermarket and bought another bottle of grape juice, and had more for lunch! I might have to bring some home with me. After lunch we had our first company visit to Beijing Hyundai. It was about an hour drive away for a roughly 45-minute tour of the plant. It was amazing to see the assembly lines and the cars being manufactured. The Chinese are masters of efficiency, and I was very surprised to see that almost every worker in the plant was under the age of 25 and male. Our guide told us the education level of the plant workers is just passing a 3 month training course, no degree needed, not even high school. The cars they make are of very high quality though, so I guess it works for them.

Now, seeing as I've gotten 6 hours of sleep in the last 51 hours, I'm just hanging out in my room, watching a movie on my computer, and playing on here and facebook now that I finally have internet again! Tomorrow we go to the Wall!!!! :)