To China!

Monday, April 19th, 2010 in: News, Travel

I slept surprisingly well considering all the things I had on my mind when I went to bed; I awoke to the buzz of my cellphone ringing; it was Kaoru with my wakeup call. Maria was already up and getting ready to work, so I fell into line and finished arranging my gear. We left together and walked to the station; we were leaving on the same train but in opposite directions, so I thanked her and gave her a big awkward hug through my backpack.

The train was uncomfortably crowded, but there was no waiting for the next one. I  squeezed myself into the crowd with my luggage. I exchanged some friendly banter with a British couple on their way home from holiday, and decided to catch the Narita Express from Shinagawa instead of Tokyo station. The ticket machine was being stubborn and I barely made it onto my train before the doors closed. I sat down and furiously punched away on my cell phone, sending my last few e-mails while I still had the opportunity. I gave my thumbs a break and switched to writing letters. The train sped unrelentingly towards the airport.

I got to the airport at exactly 9am, a little less than 2 hours before my flight. I spent that time waiting to check in my baggage and arranging to send my cell phone back to Nagoya. By the time I got through immigration and arrived at the terminal, the other passengers had already lined up to board the plane. The timing turned out perfectly, but in retrospect I should have caught an earlier train just to be safe. I’ll just consider this a free lesson for next time.

The flight was surprisingly comfortable and pleasant, with a decent meal and friendly service. The other passengers paid me no mind; I was seated next to some no-nonsense businessmen who weren’t interested in small talk. I took the cue and napped most of the flight.

Immigration and customs went surprisingly smoothly for me. I glided past other foreigners being held up for whatever reasons, and went straight to the terminal for my next flight. Shanghai airport is a rather intersting building with a massive main hall, characterized by its sweeping roof. The architecture was thick with the metaphor of flight. I found the domestic terminal and took a seat for my 3-hour layover. The airport’s free wifi gave me a glimpse of the internet through China’s eyes. To my surprise, google and gmail worked just fine, but facebook and youtube both timed out. I’m going to have to find a way around this…

When the gate opened for our shuttle to the plane, the crowd rushed the counter, and I got my first dose of the Chinese way of lining up: pushing to the front. Stuck between the people stopped in front of me and the impatient crowd pushing me forward, I wondered if anyone realized that pushing didn’t actually make the line go any faster. I suppose in a country with over 2 billion people, if you don’t push your way to the front of the line, you’ll never get there.

The brief flight to Wuhan went much like the one to Shanghai. My stuff was the first to come out of baggage claim, and as I heaved the backpack onto my shoulders, I realizzed I had no idea what Ben looked like. I didn’t need to worry, as I was the only young American with a huge backpack coming out of the gate. Ben waved me down and took me to his friend, Zhong’s waiting car. Zhong has been to Japan several times, so although his English was rusty, his Japanese was excellent and polite. I talked to Ben in English and Zhong in Japanese. I’ll have to work really hard to learn Chinese so we’ll all have a shared language.

We got a little lost and found ourselves driving on makeshift streets circumventing the amazing reconstruction around the trainstation. A lot of housing projects had been demolished to make room for new developments. I learned that Wuhan is the 5th largest city in China, covering an even larger landmass than Shanghai. To help grasp the scale, there are over 5,000 construction sites currently in the city. The dust from the construction and the poor air quality coat everything in a fine layer of dust. I think I caught my first glimpse of China’s squalor, driving through the ruins of the housing projects with people still occupying buildings whose faces had been torn down.

We checked into my hotel, a 7 Days Inn with a room almost as big as Maria’s apartment in Ebisu. Even at $20 per night, I assure Ben this is way more than I need. I could make do with a room the size of the bed here. Considering how the rest of my travels will likely go, the last thing I need is to get in the habit of living luxuriously.

Ben treated me to my first real Chinese meal, with some amazing dishes. I can taste a mild resemblance to American Chinese food, but I can instantly understand why everyone says it’s “completely different.” American Chinese food all overuses hoisin and oyster sauce, creating a rather invariable palate. All of the dishes we ordered were very distinct, from the cilantro beef to the szechuan tofu to the sweet amazake egg drop soup. I can tell already I’m going to enjoy the cuisine here. I can also tell there aren’t many foreign visitors in these parts. The kid behind me dropped his soda can, and when I picked it up and handed it to him, he froze, wide-eyed and curious. “Xie Xie!” his mom tried to cue him to thank me, but he was entranced by me. I smiled and waved it off; I got that same stare three more times between the restaurant and the hotel. A huge group dance lesson was taking place out in front of a mall, next to a makeshift roller rink where young kids waved to their parents as they raced around.

I settled back into the spacious hotel; we’d be moving to another one in the morning in a more convenient location, then maybe heading to a cheaper one after that. “You might get about half the price for another hotel,” Ben said as we walked back to the 7 Days, “but you might get only 1/10th the value.” It’s an interesting concept, I’m going to have to learn how to weigh the value of things relative to their price. And it seems that in China, everything is relative.

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