Settling in in Beijing

Week 1 in Beijing

Hey all!

I arrived safe and sound in Beijing a week ago. It’s been a pretty busy few days. Mainly I’ve been apartment hunting like crazy which is both exhausting and stressful. Unlike in the US where you walk around the area and look at buildings that are renting, in Beijing you have to go thru a middleman whom you have to pay a hefty finder’s fee. Plus the market here is crazy! If you look at an apt and don’t buy it that day, it’ll be gone by the next morning. This happened a couple of times to friends of mine looking here. Also, sometimes the middleman doesn’t really understand or chooses not to understand what you want. He’ll show you a place with dirty concrete floors and walls with holes and a bathroom outside in the street, when you just told him that you didn’t want that. And if you want to live really close to the subway, you’ll be paying a ton for a very small size (think Olin dorm room) and not very nice quality. Still it all worked out, and I have a lovely apt (nicer than my old apt in St Louis!).

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a gastronomical tour of Beijing. I have yet to be disappointed. There’s some stuff I’ve been reluctant to eat, like the piles of sea snails and the actual head of a chicken in stew, but mostly I’ve been pretty game. I’ll put up pictures soon.

Yesterday I had my first snafu with bureaucracy. So it turns out I was supposed to register at the local police bureau within 24 hours of arriving, (though in my visa it says I have 30 days, apparently there was some other slip of paper I missed). So I went with some friends in a similar situation to the police station where they told us to go to a bigger station 20 min by cab away, where they told us that we should get fined, but since we’re students we just had a sign a piece of paper apologizing for our badness and getting “punished” with a warning. Then this morning we had to go back to our local police station where they issued us temporary residence permits, and now we have to go register at yet another big bureau to get a different permit, so that we can go back to our small police station and register again. Apparently if we don’t complete this by a certain date we get fined 500 kuai a day(about US$75! Ah!) Thank goodness for friends who speak and read Chinese fluently, or else I’m not sure what I would have done. Hopefully this will all work out.

Oh btw, so far people have thought I’m Taiwanese, Singaporean, and I did get one Korean the other day. They don’t usually guess American at first. They can tell I’m not from here either cuz of the way I speak Chinese, or keep busting out into English, or the fact that I look confused when they talk to me. At one restaurant the waitress asked us where we were from and we said we were Chinese, but then we kept talking in English and didn’t recognize any of the vegetables on the menu and she kept asking: “Are you really Chinese?” haha, maybe by the end of the year I’ll blend in better.

:)m