You Haven't Seen the Last of Beijing

In the midst of a very long flight home, fresh over Fairbanks, Alaska, I wanted to take a little time and look back at my last two months in Beijing, China. First and foremost, a lot of what people hear about China back home is true and a lot is false. The pollution is terrible, Communism is alive and thriving (and a lot of the people like that, one youth told me Communism is the only way to go, and he was younger than me), poverty is huge and there really is an insane amount of people. The people for the most part are incredibly nice, Communism works well in a lot of areas of society and if you look at the percentages not that many people speak English.

A lot of these things have made the last two months one of the best times of my life and also one of the most frustrating. The Olympic Games in general are a fantastic, amazing event. It is clearly the pinnacle of sport for any serious or casual sports fan. No knock on October, my favorite month of the year, or March, but when the Olympics come around it blows both those events out of the water. Well, that is assuming the Braves aren’t in the World Series.

Mark my word, there will not be another Olympic Games that involve so many nice people. It’s long been documented, and maybe I’ve written about it too, but there were an insane amount of young Chinese volunteers, too many in fact. As I’m writing I’ve begun to wonder if there really exist an amount of people that nice or since we were in China they were trained/forced to be nice. Or maybe I’ve just become more cynical in the last two months. Almost everyday I had someone tell me “Welcome to Beijing,” and it even happened a couple times after the Games were over. These kids really had a desire to make things work well and make people feel welcome and happy. And you can’t help but applaud that. I can walk away from China knowing that these people care about other people. How many times are you going to have a cab driver pull over to ask for directions in New York? It happened to me at least a half dozen times in Beijing. We couldn’t communicate beyond a map, but they wanted to get it right so they stopped.

If you are easily frustrated, which a lot of people on this trip were, you either have to snapped out of it real quick or just go home. It is guaranteed that at least once a day some cultural difference will frustrate and annoy you to no end. I’ll vent a couple of my frustrations just because it may seem worthwhile. In China, personal space in non-existent and many typical rules just don’t apply. I’ll relay a story to demonstrate a point. To get out of a subway car one must have some space in which to step off the train, or at least one would think. That’s not really the way it works here and to be honest it really pisses me off. People instead will all stand directly in front of the door and charge in right away without the slightest attempt to let anyone off. So one day, like Custer, I took a stand. After realizing at my stop that the man boarding the train was just going to walk straight in I decided to stand there. I wasn’t going to exit, just not let him in. After attempted to juke me a few times I think he understood my point and stepped aside to let me off. And you quickly have to realize that if you don’t push in a crowd, someone is going to push you. I feel like a terrible person doing it, but there really isn’t a choice. And I would get the biggest laugh when a Chinese person would become appalled that I would push my way around. It’s dog eat dog for a lot of things there.

China is a young country, internationally speaking, and it becomes apparent in regular dealings with people. A lot of people here have a thirst for knowledge about other places. They want to know what I think, they want to know what happens in the US and they want to know why it happens. And they will go to great lengths to continue conversations and friendships. A five minute conversation can easily turn into a lifelong friendship.

I really feel like I have a ton to write about from China and I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't relay those feelings and tidbits earlier on this blog, but I would really like to now so please continue to check back.