October 14
Zhong Guan Cun District, Beijing
3:50. Really? No, can’t be. It feels like I slept all day. Yep, 4:10 AM. Still pitch dark outside. This must be that jet lag people kept warning me about.
I’m already unpacked, no chance of going back to sleep. I spend the next 45 minutes watching the end of Karate Kid 2, dubbed in Mandarin, with Chinese sub-titles. I was totally lost until the big dramatic fight scene at the end.
I found an English speaking news channel on television. I love watching news from places where I’m not from. It seems like a long format news station (much like a news magazine). The perspective is not nearly as anti-American as American news is anti-Everyone_Else. It really struck me as to the difference in news styles. It was more like the BBC. It was more like, well, news.
My head is fuzzy, but I don’t feel tired yet. So I take a shower.
I have to stop here, and say that – as you can tell, I’ve not felt very positive about my experiences so far – this shower in my hotel room is really, really nice. It has a double shower head switchable to a hand-held shower head. It just feels nice. The water pressure is really strong, too.
I go down to eat the hotel breakfast:
- 2 steamed buns with different fillings
- 2 pieces of “baked bacon”
- 1 Fairly McDonald’s style potato cake (they call it potato pie)
- 1 piece of very British tasting sausage
- 1 Hard Boiled brown egg
- 1 French style croissant
There’s another American here that I’m supposed to be able to meet up with, and at 10 in the morning I call him up. Of course, he’s younger than me so he’s sleeping, and says he’ll call me back later.
This is the point where the jet lag really starts bugging me. I’m all restless, but tired too. I start to watch some DVDs that I took with me (there’s a DVD player in my room). About 1pm, I’m totally annoyed that I didn’t get a call back, and decide to go see what I can find.
I’ll start by simply saying that I walked in the wrong direction. I didn’t know it then. I did find a 7-11, a McDonalds, someplace called Big Pizza, and a Dairy Queen - all along a road that was so wide it had pedestrian bridges across it at regular intervals. I totally didn’t bring the camera (should have).
On the way back to the Hotel, I stopped by the 7-11 and bought a can of Pringles, some Laundry Soap and a liter of “Coke Light”. When I got back here, I puttered around a little, drank some Coke Light, ate half the Pringles, cleaned my dirty clothes (not much, but wanted to figure out how the machine worked) - it’s a “Washer / Dryer”, and all of the instructions are in Chinese, so I sort of guessed, and ended up with clean dry clothes two hours later.
I ate some Ramen noodle type thing for Dinner (the hotel had a few items that they started me off with - including tea bags and bottled water). About 9PM, the other American called me back, and told me that he had fallen back to sleep, and didn’t wake up until 2, and that he had tried calling then. We made arrangements to meet up in the morning.
Tired and fuzzy, and having taken no useful pictures… I went to bed. Tomorrow is the first day at work.