Pictured: "Shenzhen Int'l Airport", "Police Van Man"
This is the second part of my two-part entry on my trip to Beijing (2011). It's not necessarily in chronological order, it just fills in the blanks that are left around the description of what happened on Saturday.
To begin with, the journey from Hong Kong to Shenzhen was very long. The cities are so close together but yet so (politically) far away. I had to take the subway out of Hong Kong, which took about an hour, and then immigrate to China through the border control gate, and then take the Shenzhen subway across the city for another hour and a half. By the time I got to Shenzhen airport almost three hours had passed and it was near 11 pm. I slept in the airport, which was like camping and not very dangerous, because there were about nine or ten people doing it with me, on some benches at the end of a terminal where the authorities allowed us to stay.
In the morning, I managed to find my way to the gate and onto the plane (in Chinese. But real Chinese this time.) I was excited, because by leaving at 8 in the morning we'd get to Beijing by 11am and I'd be afforded almost three whole days to enjoy the city.
We were then promptly detained for two hours because the tower wouldn't grant us takeoff clearance. Typical of the bureaucratic mainland.
I finally arrived in Beijing at around 3pm. It was enough time to go to the places I'd missed the most, go back to the place I lived when I studied there in 2009, and to visit the very same baozi stand that I frequented when I stayed near it back in high school.
Fast forward to after I left from hanging out with APSA on Saturday. I went to see a friend of mine who is living in Beijing and attending engineering classes through a program offered by our university. The area of town where he lives, adjacent to Tsinghua University (清华大学, a leading Chinese university), is necessarily a hotspot for students and people our age to hang out. We went out for a kind of expensive (by Beijing standards) dinner of hot pot; the restaurant was a cultural experience of its own, food notwithstanding. An example of what I'm talking about is that the restaurant is divided into smaller rooms where four or five parties each will sit together and eat (kind of like Hibachi). The wait, however, had us sitting at a small table drinking lemon juice and playing Chinese checkers for ten minutes, while ten or more other groups waited at identical tables.
After eating, we went to the bars nearby. I'd heard good things about the nightlife in Beijing, but when I showed up to meet some of my friend's classmates, I forgot for a minute what country I was in. The crowd in Beijing was very social and heavily contrasted the vibes I felt in other places with lots of people. Places like these bear testament to the modernization and redefinition of the psyche of China's inhabitants. As I re-explored the city, I came to find that it had grown and changed in many less superficial ways.
The next day, I went to visit a friend of mine, the philanthropic businessman helped set the APSA program in motion back in 2008. We caught up and talked, and I asked him how business was. Having been a consultant and entrepreneur in Beijing since the 1990's, he said that business was great, but that he was concerned about an imminent decline; he, and other knowing interests in China's tertiary economic sector, believed that there was only so much 'good business' to be done before things became more difficult.
As I moved around the city that day, I noticed marked differences that corroborated his point. At the pearl market, for instance, which I visited on multiple occasions in 2009 to buy several things at arguable prices, several stores had closed, prices had increased, and the crowds had thinned. The Chinese renminbi has been rising on the dollar since the last time I was here; that, combined with lower tourism (I'm guessing) and possibly government influence have come to bear on the merchant economy in Beijing.
The last thing I did on Sunday was go to Wangfujing to get dinner, and then show up at the airport too late to fly. In my distractions I had forgotten that Beijing to Hong Kong is an international flight (unlike the one I flew in on from Shenzhen) and I had to check in an hour in advance. How sad. I made my way back to my friend's place on Zhengfu road, got some watermelon to bring as a consolation prize/housewarming present, and popped a squat for the night.
And at 5:30 this morning, I got up, panicked because the sun was up, remembered that the sun arises extremely early in Beijing, and set out for the taxi that I had arranged to be picked up by the night before*. I made it to the airport and onto my plane, sat on the tarmac for an hour and half again while I stewed (I watched the time that I was supposed to arrive at work pass me by on my watch) and finally made it to Hong Kong only to wait in more lines, sit on more trains, and arrive at the office no earlier than 2:15 in the afternoon to put in a legit half day of work.
Now, Monday night, is my first time being back 'home' since Thursday morning. I think I'll have some sleep.
*Here is a great time to mention (again) how convenient it is to be able to actually read, speak, and understand what is going on around me. In Hong Kong i have about half a clue what's happening at any given time; that'd have to be one of the few things I didn't miss about HK. 普通话.
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