Your Nervousness is Unnecessary

That is what the kind man in the Bejing airport responded with as I told him how nervous I was about coming to China.

And so far...so good.

I started my journey at 5am on Wednesday morning.  Everything was pretty normal for the first two legs of my journey, Tallahassee to Charlotte and Charlotte to JFK.  They were both pretty short flights, so a couple of plastic cups of orange juice and we were touching down at the destination city.

And then came the monster JFK -> Beijing flight.  In which I learned two things:

I cannot sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time while sitting up -and- Chinese people love Sandra Bullock movies.

And the in-flight food was awesome.

Potato salad, pineapple shortcake, chicken and noodles, and roll (with Country-Crock).

After the flight, I immediately latched on to a group of Chinese people that were also traveling to Nanjing.  I followed them and made small talk (with those that spoke English) and eventually got on the right plane to Nanjing.

Sarah and Anna were waiting for me at the Nanjing Airport, and they found me.  Wandering around with all my luggage.  I was pretty content to keep walking around the terminal until someone yelled at me and got my attention.  We crammed into Anna's car and made our way back to our apartment.

I slept for about 6 hours and then Dane took me outside to show me how to get a taxi.  Which for now will involve flagging a car down and shoving a piece of paper in their face with the location to which I want to travel.  I basically spent the rest of the morning hanging around and trying to unpack all my stuff.

Our shower is wonderful, and has a huge window facing the sprawl:

I feel a bit voyeur-ish showering with this window open...but it just feels so good.

Anna picked me up in the afternoon and got me situated with money, residency papers, etc.  She then took us to dinner...and yeah.  This is when I regretted not bringing my camera along.

We had dinner in a Communist-Revolution themed restaurant.  Mao on every wall.  Happy Chinese citizens looking to the skies with pride/hope/happiness.  It was incredible looking.  Then actors dressed as members of the Communist Party came out and sang a variety of traditional Chinese songs while we ate.

And by no means was dinner made "normal" relative to the entertainment:

• Stinky tofu
• Sichaun-style frog legs
• Pigeon wings
• Fish dumplings
• Fried bananas
• Little doughy buns with hollowed out centers to stuff with tofu
• Unidentifiable fried fish
• Some stringy green vegetable

And beer.  Lots of really light beer.  Which was imbibed one shot glass at a time.  Which makes you feel like an alcoholic as you pour glass after glass of 1.5oz of beer.  An only hot water was served.  The hot water is definitely something that I'll have to get used to drinking.  But yep.  Pretty cool day.

Oh yeah, and I got a cell phone.  And you might be wondering how the Chinese type since they have no alphabet-like system.  They actually use the roman-character transliterations, known as pinyin, to type individual characters.  The following three images document my triumphant journey of typing "hello" in a text message:





I'll try to actually bring my camera around a bit more so I can post more than just pictures of my airplane food and cell phone. ;)