Back to Beijing

September 27, 2008

We arrived in Beijing at 3am yesterday morning and after two weeks of nonstop travel it feels good to be back in Beijing. The past two weeks have been exciting, exhausting, eye-opening and so much more. I’m still trying to process all that we encountered and experienced on our journey. I think the purpose of this trip was to show us the vast cultural and environmental diversity across China. It worked. We covered a very large distance and experienced a lot of Chinese culture, but I know there is so much more to learn and understand. 

    We started out in Xi’an where we visited the site of the Terracotta Warriors and ended up in Xinjiang province where from the top of a mountain we could see Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia in the distance. I now have a much better appreciation for the difficulties the Chinese government faces in trying to unite a country with so much diversity. Beijing is a very modern city and is still rapidly changing and adapting. Most of China, however, has not taken the same path as Beijing. Many of the cities or villages that we visited rarely receive foreigners. We were stared at… a lot. Peddlers on the side of the street kept yelling “hello” at us, because that was the only English word they knew and they thought it would make us want to buy their products. For the most part, though, everyone was very friendly and welcoming to us.
On our trip we encountered several of China’s different ethnic groups. Beijing and the eastern part of China have mostly Han Chinese, which is what most people think of when they imagine China. However, not all Chinese look or speak like the Han Chinese. Every ethnic group in China speaks its own language except Muslims who speak mandarin. Of course, other ethnic groups are required to learn mandarin in addition to their native languages. In Xi’an and Xining we encountered many Muslims and ate at several Muslim restaurants. You can usually recognize a Muslim Chinese by their clothing, which is different from the traditional Han style. In Qing Hai we spent the night with a Tibetan family. Unlike the Han Chinese, Tibetans have very dark skin and the women have long black hair. To me they looked more like Native Americans than Han Chinese. Most of Tibetans actually live outside of Tibetan Proper and we saw several Buddhist monasteries and temples. In Hemu we ate dinner with a Tuvan family and spent the day with a Uyghur family. Tuvans have very round faces and rosy cheeks. The Uyghur nationality appeared almost Arabic to me. Hemu is located in far northwest China which has a little bit of an Eastern European influence, so the Uyghur language sounds a lot like Russian, and some of them even have light hair and blue eyes. The Uyghur family I met didn’t speak English and we of course didn’t speak their language, but we were able to communicate by speaking Mandarin. I found it very exciting that we could both communicate with each other through a second language.

       Not only does China have extensive ethnic diversity, it also has environmental diversity. One day we rode camels in the Gobi Desert and slid down sand dunes on bamboo sleds, and the next day we hiked through the forest and climbed up snow capped mountains. We also tried several native foods on this trip including lamb chuanr (very tasty), milk beer (disgusting), and one of my braver friends even tried a caterpillar (she said it was gross and I took her word for it). In general the food on our trip was very good, but every once in a while it’s nice to enjoy the familiarity of McDonald’s or KFC which is readily available throughout much of China.

             I could write a book about all of the things that we saw and experienced, so I will have to save the details for later. But for now I can say that the past two weeks definitely changed my perception of China. We had our highs and our lows, as every excursion does, but overall we had an incredible time. I had the opportunity to get to know my classmates and my teachers better, and it is nice to be able to share with them the wonder and confusion of all that we encountered. By the time we reached Hemu (three nights of temperatures below zero with no heater and no hot water) we were all ready to come home to Beijing. It’s weird to call Beijing home now, but on our trip we all realized that we missed it. Of course I miss my friends and family in the United States more, but I’ve acclimated to Beijing and enjoy living here. I still get homesick, but emails and Skype have helped me stay in touch. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in China for a month now. Classes start back on Monday which always makes time pass much faster, so for now I’m just trying to soak it all up and attempt to process the last two weeks’ adventures.