I’m sipping my latte completely alone in the hostel café because I’m the only one awake at this hour. Unsurprising given that we fell asleep hard around 8pm last night. It seems despite my efforts to counteract jet lag by adjusting my sleep schedule for the few days prior to the trip, and attempting strategic airplane naps, my circadian rhythm is still out of whack and making itself felt. Hey look, I’m a morning person! First miracle of the trip right there.
Though it’s only been a day and a half since we touched down, I’m already seeing a couple ways how all the planning and preparation has paid off (or not).
One thing we did well
Planned to keep our ambitions low for the first few days. We scheduled absolutely nothing for the first day even though we landed mid-afternoon, instead assuming that just getting ourselves to the hostel, checked in, and figuring out how to feed ourselves a meal would be plenty, and we were right. The next day we had nothing planned, and didn’t try to do any major sites or attractions. Instead, we allowed ourselves to slowly wander the immediate neighborhood of the hostel, get ourselves coffee and breakfast, nap, do some Beijing research at the hostel, then find lunch, and only then worry about what to go out and “do”.
Before we left, Rorie told me his style of travel was to “do” only one major thing every day (a museum or temple, a market, a park). To me, used to much more structured and quick vacations, this seemed overly conservative, and I thought we’d be bored and miss out on a lot. After less than two days on the ground, I’ve already told Rorie that I’m completely on board. Here in China so far, everything is an activity that requires mental and physical energy. Going to grab coffee and a pastry our first morning took us maybe two hours, and afterwards we needed a nap. It’s so foreign and we are so unfamiliar with the language, signage, and customs that spending most of the day just dealing with acquiring food seems productive. I’m SO glad we didn’t try to do a major attraction or tour the first couple days.
Cooking our own meat in our spicy hotpot for lunch
One thing we didn’t do well
Underestimated the difficulty in communication and everyday interactions. The first evening, we found a small spot around the corner that had English translations on the menu. As soon as we sat down, the waitress handed us the menus, then immediately stayed at the table, hovering inches from us and looking at us expectantly. Our gestures of “we need a minute” and “we don’t know what we want yet” didn’t work at all, and she just smiled and stayed right there until a British man came to our rescue. He asked if we spoke English, then said “do you need a few minutes to look at the menu?” Relieved, we said yes, and he nodded knowingly and pulled from his wallet a slip of paper with Chinese characters written on it. He showed the paper to our waitress, who laughed, nodded, and walked away. “I got this written down for me and I use it everywhere” the man said, before heading back to his table as we profusely thanked him. Then, when we decided that in our post-airplane exhaustion we would both order the same chicken and vegetable stir fry since it seemed safe, we couldn’t manage to convey that we wanted two of the same dish. The waitress was so confused (holding up two fingers didn’t work) that she brought over another employee who eventually pulled out her iphone calculator and typed the number “2” on it for us to confirm that’s what we actually wanted. Rorie and I looked at each other as we realized the magnitude of our helplessness and vowed to learn at least a couple basic terms.
While obviously we knew we didn’t speak Mandarin, and we knew we couldn’t read Chinese characters, I didn’t quite appreciate how crippling it is to not even have roman characters on the signs. Street signs are complete gibberish, and we’ve quickly realized we’re limited to only food spots with (a) menus with English, or (b) food laid out that we can just point to. That eliminates a lot of spots that I’m sure are delicious, but with absolutely no idea what anything is, we aren’t yet ready to blindly guess.
How am I supposed to follow this?!
What I’m doing about it
What would lessons be without learning from them? I’ve now bookmarked several key phrases on my Google Translate app so I can practice, and if/when that fails, I can pull up the characters and show my phone to the person I’m trying to talk to. So far, I’ve saved the following words (already having mastered “thank you” and “hello”): Bottled water, coffee, goodbye, chicken, pork, beef, and bathroom. All the essentials, apparently. We’ll see how this goes over the next few days as we settle in!
Any other recommendations for making our lives easier as we navigate Beijing? We’d love to hear them!
Seen in the historic hutongs in Beijing
