Beijing welcomes you

Foreword : It has been a few days that I am struggling for passing through the “Great firewall of China” which prevents me from accessing as far as my innocent blog… thus I chose a temporary method, posting this article by a derived mean, please forgive the problems in presentation.

Beijing, there I am.

The question, was Beijing going to welcome me, as sung in the 2008 Beijing Olympics promotion song : 北京欢迎你 – “Beijing welcomes you”, seems to have found an answer. Although things are not neat, clean, and straightforward as I could previously experience with Hong Kong, I can already tell they have their own proper, strong character, and indeed have brought me a warm feeling entering this new world.

In the huge capital, I have found home in the non less immense campus of Tsinghua University. Located in the North-west part of Beijing, in an academic and technological area, the university can under my own estimation hold about 3 times the Forbidden City. Those who have visited the latter can have an idea of what it means… For the other, let’s say that I’ve used up my legs way enough in the two first days walking throughout the city in the city, before I was smart enough to decide acquiring a bike (a middle-ranged one, for a reasonable 260 Yuan = 43 CHF).

Somehow, this should have occured to me earlier, as I saw entire roads fenced by rows of hundreds, thousands of bikes… It seems reasonable to think that every student in the University should own a bike on his own, without what he would be wasting entire hours travelling around the campus. Considering that Tsinghua counts around 31’000 students (14’000 undergraduates and 17’000 postgraduates…!), and without counting the ghost-bikes forming whole cemitaries, this means a great bunch of bikes… But it seems I’m repeating stories of previous people visiting Beijing, yes it seems that bikes are still the actuality of the capital, and I may find my Chinese lessons taken in Hong Kong useful, and quote the following text :
“正好是下班的时间，街道两旁慢行道上成千上万的自行车像潮水一样流动。”
“Just at the getting-off-work time, the cycling lanes on both sides of the road holded tens of thousands (= a lot) of bicycles, looking like flowing tidewater.”

Even more interesting than the flow of bicycles is the corresponding human flow. What happens on the roads of Beijing seems to be naively comparable with what happens generally in China. And gliding your way through the flow of bicycles, without more specific rules, signs, but only being supported by a surrounding tide of people, forcing you into a unique but somehow comfortable way, can indeed give you an idea of living as a Chinese. What can just be observed is that, against all odds, this driving style works.

I had enough time (and I will certainly yet have much, much more) of the crude style of bicycle riding, as I was criss-crossing the campus to take the administrative steps along with my arrival here. Here, no “go take elevator n°23 to the admission office”, walking through the unique academic building of HKUST, but rather “take the 30min bus to the health and care department, dive into another crowd of incoming foreigners, and the next day, repeat the same steps for picking up the documents”. About foreigners, my thought and hope of Beijing turned out to be correct: although numerous foreigners are present in Beijing, they get insignificant and lost among the Chinese number. That is without saying that lots of them are not so easy to figure out, as a majority of foreigners is seemingly Korean, after what the fractions are more balanced between Europeans (of all kind), Americans, and other Asians.

As one of the interesting experiences in Tsinghua, I had a taste of Chinese military order as I was riding one morning through the campus alleys. A military theme started to be played at the distance (it might have been kms…!), and I was wondering if it was the normal morning motivation anthem for the students…! Riding a bit further, I caught sight of the source of the music, along with slogan shouted by apparently (again), a huge number of people. Some entire companies wearing military outfits were thus marching and exercising on one of the stadiums. The most shocking part is when I realized the groups were formed not only with men, but women along! Later, I learned from Eesa that these kind of “trainings” were compulsory part of the education for all Chinese students… Such 1 to 4-weeks trainings had to be followed up to 3 times by a Chinese student! However, no other compulsory military service exists for Chinese citizens, apparently for logistic reasons, no wonder…!

I’m surprising myself, I didn’t say anything about food yet! Here, not many surprises, I am pleasantly discovering the northern style of food and experiencing the differences with Hong Kong international diversity. Here, it seems (without asserting anything final since I have only explored few places yet) that the western food mostly has a place in fast-foods, with unsurprisingly MacDonalds, Pizza huts, KFCs and Starbucks Coffees. The second popular food might well be Korean food, which is understandable with their number here. Mostly Korean were thus populating the restaurant where I ate last night with Eesa and a fellow student from EPFL. Again, more interestingly for me, it seems that more diversity can be found in the Chinese style dishes in all restaurants, with an apparent preference for Sichuan spicy food. The food is also notably, the hell (paradise?) cheap. For reference, my last dinner in a canteen on-campus cost me 4.25 Yuan (5 including the drink), which is equivalent to… 0.7CHF. This is just to say that the extreme contrasts met in Hong Kong are here pushed way further. I haven’t yet experienced to higher side to really be speaking about contrasts though, but I’m not in a hurry to do so. I have a few dozens of canteens and restaurants to explore on-campus first! Good news is that my stomach had less trouble with “mainland food” this time, making an exception from the general rule of gastric troubles met during all previous visits to China.

For the down-town Beijing, my only exploration out of my administrative struggle has been to Xidan, which turned out to be a quite hip area, with huge shopping malls (nothing exciting here after spending 6 weeks in Hong Kong…), and a more stylished part of the population. It seemed that a couple of cool Hong Kong young people, although changing the style into something … less Hong Kong, blushing their skin white, and giving them 15 more centimeters. Hum, this is a quite poor way to summarize it. Anyway, I will have to experience and know more before giving more details. I also sadly ended up my mobile-phone enquiry there, which I have been carrying since soon after my arrival. The conclusion is that I won’t be able to make full use of my new mobile phone, as no 3G network is seriously set-up here, at least not under the same norms than Europe and conversely, Hong Kong.

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In one word, promissing!

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