The travels of Justin

11 hours in the air later, Ryan and I are enjoyed a Tsing Tao beer (~CAD$1.50) in the sub-basement of our hostel, the Far East International Hostel. Beijing is big. Really big. Traffic was almost as thick as the air. We could have easily reached out the window and touched many cars, bikes, etc. I was surprised that even though the driving style is fluid, it was less aggressive than Vancouver in some ways, and it’s much less of a free-for-all as Bangkok. For the most part, the drivers stay in their lanes and the speed never gets too fast, although I’m sure that’s partly because of the quantity of drivers. We never got above 60 kph on the highway.

The hostel is nice. Hardwood floors. Our own bathroom. Lots of options for budget concious travellers of all stripes. I’m very happy with it.

Lots of construction around the city. The economic boom is clearly visible everywhere you look. Most impressive to me was the airport which seemed to be doubling or tripling its size. Cranes are on every building.

People seem very nice. We expected more people to speak English, but it makes me glad to know we’ll be forced to learn new words; if we don’t learn some basic words, we’ll have a hard time for certain. The few words we do know we pronounce so badly it’s as if we don’t really know them either. Seriously.

Big lesson of the day: get the hostel location translated from the English confirmation email into Chinese characters. Keep a phone number handy so the cabbie can call if he has questions. Some other Canadian travelers on the flight suggested we translate, so we asked someone in the airport baggage area (before the scrum of taxi drivers fight for your attention) and it helped a lot.

This is a great start to our adventure. We’re looking forward to more adventures tomorrow and touring the city. We can see lit-up buildings from our 4^th floor room and I’m curious what they are. We’ve got a lot to discover and even more to learn.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 4:22 am and is filed under Life and living, Tianjin, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.