Beijing!!!!

I am now in China.....and having a grand time exploring this huge city. I arrived on Thursday, July 15th after a short 1.5 hour flight from Seoul. I managed to get through the medical screening for swine flu. It was a pretty daunting experience. Before you can even leave your seat in the airplane, people in full body "armor" (white suits, eye goggles, masks, booties) flood onto the airplane and go person to person checking their temperature with a sensor placed on your head. If you are one degree higher than normal, you get handed a mask and remain on the airplane. The guy in the seat row in front of me had that happen to him. We deplaned and he had to stay.

Once you were in the terminal you again had to pass three more screenings. Each of these was a heat sensitive camera that did a full body scan. Again I saw people yanked out of line and herded into a screened area. Not sure what happens to them at that point--although CNN Asia had a short piece about a reporter who failed the temp. test and ended up being transported to a hospital in Beijing and waiting 8 hours for a H1V1 test to be screened. He was released at that point.

So....I am healthy and was able to hop into a taxi and was taken to a hotel on the campus of Beijing Normal University. This place is HUGE! The campus is similar in size to MU--although it seems to have many more people around. The picture below is of the main administrative building. Again, a huge monolith....which reminds me of the Russian built structures in Hanoi. And this structure is nothing out of the ordinary. Beijing seems to be loaded with massive non-descript type of high-rise buildings that are everywhere. Row upon row of them...mile after mile. The last image below is taken from my hotel window. It is a clear, sunny day.....but the smog, haze and crap in the air makes it a polluted, hazy view. No sun, no clouds, nothing but thick haze.





I gave a lecture to a small group of geography education graduate students my first day. School is not is session now, so only a handful of students were still around. But the talk seemed to be well received and I was finished by noon on my first day.

I ate a meal at one of the student cafeterias....I have been assigned a graduate student who is helping me navigate this huge city. Her name is He....(but I call her June--her English name) and she is wonderful. I told June that I ate in a student cafeteria in Vietnam and in Korea--and would like a China experience. She was surprised, but off we went.

The food was good....we had rice (always!) and tomatoes with egg, chicken and carrots, black rice cake, calliflower, another green vegetable and a coke. It cost her about $2 for all this food for both of us.




The food was interesting and actually pretty good. I have decided that Chinese food is the best! If I lived here a long time--I would be a big old blimp after a few weeks. Four-five wonderful dishes and soup at each meal. In Korea I didn't eat much because I didn't like the food. But here....yum. Eggplant with pork and garlic. Dumplings! Below is another food photo from another dinner. The eggplant was outstanding!




So, things have started well for me in Beijing. I am not sure how much I will have to "work" and how much will be play....but hopefully I will be able to see a bit of the city and get a feeling for how well things work.