First impressions

My first real post at my blog about my first impressions of Beijing. To be honest it feels kind of unreal to be here, I feel a bit like walking in a movie set and somewhere expect to walk out of it very soon. This metaphor doesn’t make any sense at all since I have never been on a movie set in my life. However it does describe my feelings for this new world and it’s not completely rubbish to think that those charming hutong streets will only belong to movies in ten or twenty years. Happily enough at this moment the hostel I stay in, is located just at the border of one of those hutongs. I won’t be too romantic about it, and I know that the CCP has a few good reasons to break down most of the hutongs, (The citizens of those lovely neighborhoods have a really small home and have to go to a public toilet and shower, which is a bit outdated, even in China.) but these hutongs are the best part of China I have seen so far. Although the Olympic area with the Birds nest was very impressive as well.

Those first few days made me think back to those first days in London when I started my time as an exchange student there. In some way it’s the same experience I guess, a completely new situation, new people, big city etc. Well the similarity with London kind of stops with my experience for going abroad for a longer time, although both London and Beijing are extremely big cities, and both cities have hosted the Olympics (just like Amsterdam!), and both the English and the Chinese drink beer with less than 4% alcohol, but then tend to drink an awful lot of it. Apart from that the difference between London and Beijing is just as big as the difference between Beijing and Amsterdam. Anyway so far I have a very good time, I like to order breakfast in the charming hutong (which in 10 years will probably not exist anymore) in Chinese which is just good enough for some really basic communications and because this are my first days here there are just too many things to see.

Last but not least a nice anecdote. When I stood in the elevator in the hostel the first day, a Chinese guy asked me “Are you from the Netherlands?” Which is really surprising cause so far most Chinese think I’m France, German, Russian, American or English, basically they just name all the big foreign countries they know of. I can’t lie about a slight feeling of pride by being recognized as a Dutch person, although it sounded a bit gay when he said he could see it because of my eyes.

Another memorable thing is the amazing amount of fireworks they fired on Monday, the first full day that I was in Beijing. This is probably one of the reasons why the new CCTV building was burned down. I haven’t seen the fire and I will never see the building… Happily enough the CCTV tower from Remco Koolhaas survived the fire so I will take a look there sometime, before there is another fire.

Finally the last thing which is absolutely fantastic is the food, it’s extremely varied, it’s cheap and so far I have only eaten delicious! So that’s it for now, my first impression about this new city is in a small summary: very chaotic, fascinating and exciting.