After a flight from Atlanta to D.C. and then a 13.5 hour flight to Beijing, we finally arrived in China. It was around 2 am Tuesday morning your time and about 2 pm Tuesday here. The flight was long but not that bad. Believe it our not, we actually met a GPC student on the flight that was on her way home to China for the summer.
It has been interesting being the foreigners. People have been pretty nice to us. We've had children and parents approach us to speak with us in English and sometimes have there pictures taken with us. Some just say "Hello" or "Welcome", others ask us "How are you doing" or "Where are you from?"
Between meeting people on the plane and meeting people in the streets, I've been talking about GPC and our faculty/staff trip quite a bit over the last two days. They seem pretty excited to to talk with us and to hear why we are here.
The following is a letter from Debra Denzer, the director of the Center for International Education at GPC, with more details.
"Dear Friends,
If you can imagine, after traveling 20 hours from Atlanta to Beijing, our group cheerfully passed through customs to meet our Beijing guide and van outside the new Beijing Airport. If you saw the New York Times article a couple weeks ago, you saw the photos of this beautiful new facility. Driving on the highway from the airport to our hotel, I was deeply impressed with a China I didn’t recognize from 27 years ago. New highways, new cars, landscaping, tall neat buildings.
At our hotel, the lessons began. Keys that open the door are also used as key controls for the light switch (the electricity is off until turned on). Dinner in the hotel restaurant (and breakfast today (Wednesday) included both familiar looking and previously unfamiliar dishes. Everyone worked with chopsticks, some more successfully than others. After dinner, the group explored the surrounding areas, discovering how to use a “web-bar” (internet café), decipher labels to buy hair gel, and enjoyed the evening life in the park—children roller-skating on skates that light up, people playing badminton, impromptu musicians—including the “er hu” and finding a spot to enjoy a beer and watching the evening activities. We were humbled by the experience of being a foreigner (Caucasian and African American in an Asian society) and the inability to read signs, billboards, and advertisements. Amongst this, the group developed a sense of togetherness and team effort.
First night in the hotel brought questions: what’s the voltage? Do I need an adapter? A transformer? Why did the phone ring during the night (in everyone’s room at different times?) How do you say “toilet paper” in Chinese? Where can we get the best deal on phone cards? Where can we buy stamps? (We’ll answer these in future blogs.)
Day One
Personal reflection: At 6:00 a.m. already up and showered, I took a walk down the avenue out front of the hotel and was delighted to discover the China I remembered: elders doing Tai Chi, children walking to school with their backpacks (and staring a little more subtly than before at the foreigner,) vendors preparing fried bread, I am going to summarize because you cannot begin to imagine how packed our day was, how much we learned, what we shared together and individually).
Tienman Square, which we learned is the largest square in the world and the setting of many historical events in China, was packed with visitors, Chinese and foreign alike. Hawkers tried to sell souvenirs but we learned to bargain shamelessly if we really wanted to buy something. The air was as hazy and polluted as we expected to see so there was no looking into the distance, but the scene before us was completely mesmerizing. The portrait of Mao overlooking the square is unchanged (and unchanging) though the report of the young people of his role in China has changed from the generation before.
We followed our China Bridge leaders through the Forbidden City (home of the Emperor). We were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the Forbidden City, 170 acres. The attention to the details of the architecture, the millions of laborers that it took to build. It felt almost like a religious experience—the spectacularness of the place was awesome.
It was fascinating to see it with other Chinese tourists from all over China, many of whom appeared to be seeing it for the first time. Many of them seemed to find us as interesting as we found China on this first day. The whole scope is hard to imagine without being there and hard to absorb even when you are there. Some particularly liked the more intimate areas of rock formations and pine trees, enclosed within areas. The degree of details in all of the architecture (every ceiling beam, hall way, door was detailed with hand painted designs and gold). We learned that the Forbidden City took 16 years to build---inconceivable except in a country where the number of laborers is unlimited.
This afternoon we visited Qinghua Daxue where we were guided by four students (one engineering grad student, an English junior, one Chinese sophomore, one economic freshman from Hong Kong). This visit deserves its own entry, and we’ll try to get to that tomorrow.
I’ve left off our meals today, which were also learning/adaptation experiences worthy of entries.
But now, we’ve been up and on the go for more than 12 hours and so will sign off. Ming tien, jian."
