The Staysniak has landed!

Ack! A thousand apologies all around to the huge delay! I'm sorry, things have been extremely busy here, and plus it's hard to get internet access save early in the morning, when few people are in the wireless study lounge. If too many people are in the lounge using the wireless, then the internet becomes so slow it's surreal. 

Now, then - I knew that I was traveling from Chicago to Beijing, but I didn't exactly know what route the plane would be taking to get there. I just assumed that it'd be a straight shot across the rest of the US and then across the Pacific. As it turns out, I was very, very much wrong about that. Instead, the flight went north, far up into northern Canada, literally almost over the north pole (well, not directly over, but we were pretty darn close to the top of the world), and then over the far east end of Russia over Mongolia and continued on down south until we reached our destination. I however didn't realize this until I glanced outside and saw ice formations floating in the water below us. (See first three photos below, taken somewhere over Northern Canada.)

Besides that, the longest plane ride of my entire life to this date wasn't all that exciting, save for a nasty bout of turbulence that we ran into near the end. While in retrospect it wasn't all that serious, while in the midst of it I could do little else but think over and over, "Oh please, not while we're so close." Of course, it didn't help one smidgeon when a flight attendant announced on the intercom that we were supposed to leave our carry-ons behind in case of an emergency landing. Fortunately, my exaggerated fears were all for naught, and we touched down in one piece. 

The airport was impressive, to say the very least - extremely clean, English translations on almost all signs and notices there, and to be honest, we were all hardly there very long at all. We didn't have to do that much other than show our passports and visas to the officials, and then go pick up our luggage before meeting up with some staff from TBC who got us aboard the buses for to take us to the University of International Business and Economics, where the Beijing Center is located. 

I haven't exactly seen much of the city so far, but the area we're in is quite nice, and surprisingly upscale...so much it doesn't quite feel like China, almost. I'll of course get into more detail with that in a later entry, on a day when not so much is happening. And the university meanwhile is....well, like nothing I've seen in the states. It's basically like a small town almost, with buildings here the size of small skyscrapers and a student body that's simply enormous, to say the very least (supposedly one of the girls' dorms here alone has over 10,000 students in it, making it the largest dorm building in all of East Asia, or so claimed by my host student.)What makes this all almost frightening is the fact that this is one of the smaller universities in the city, which means that the bigger colleges must have a study body the size of.... something unfathomable. Apologies for the fact I have no pictures of it yet, I'll get around to all that ASAP!

The dorm I'm staying at is definitely nothing on that scale, although the international students dormitory is several floors tall. My room is fairly small, but my roommate Jenson and I don't mind it, and are getting along with it just fine. It has it's quirks though, like the fact that the bathroom, although private, is more or less a large shower with a sink and toilet inside of it. The showerhead basically just juts out of the wall in one corner, with nothing really to divide that little area from the rest of the room. 

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. Upon arrival to our dorm, we all just piled into our rooms and started unpacking. I did however finally have the pleasure of meeting my roommate, Jenson Hong. Unlike other students in the program, he didn’t go to the orientation in Chicago, though not at all without good reason; his hometown is Honolulu, so it would be pretty impractical for him to travel all the way to the Midwest, and then back west to the Far East.

 

After an hour or so of trying to put our rooms together, we all gathered in the front lobby at about 7:00 for a large group dinner at a nearby restaurant, which had quite the interesting set-up; we all set at large tables equipped with massive lazy susans sitting in the middle, upon which waitresses would just pile dish after dish after dish which everyone would share. All of it was quite delicious, but…… to be frank, I don’t think I had a single clue about the identity of anything that I ate. Again, I'm sorry for the total lack of photographs, as I failed to bring my camera with me to the meal.

 

Whenever anyone was finished, they were free to return to the dorm as they pleased (as the UIBE campus was literally less than a block away), and upon my return to my room, I more or less passed our a little after 9:00 AM as the jet lag finally caught up to me with a vengeance. 

That's the basic gist of how the first day here went. Like I said, I'll go into further detail on certain subjects (the neighborhood, the university, etc.) later when I have more time. Right now, I'm just trying to fervently make up for the two-day delay I'm working at now, which I hope I can accomplish before Monday when we leave for a twelve-day trip on the Silk Road.

Sorry once more, everyone!