The travels of Justin

After a great day of exploring yesterday today represented a day of transition from a vacation-type of exploration and language learning to school and classes. Our day really started when we arrived at the Beijing-West train station to catch the commuter train to Tianjin. For RMB$30 the train will take you through the peaceful countryside to Tianjin in about 70 minutes. For both Ryan and I this was our first time on a train. As one enters, everyone must drop their bags through the x-ray machine. I showed a guard our ticket and he pointed us upstairs where the platforms are. Once we found our way to the train we didn’t know which seat to take. The lady who checked my ticket said 4, but when I saw the number 40 I suppose I got excited and took the seat assuming she had simplified forty with the number four. In my mind I reasoned that she couldn’t make forty with her hands, so she just held up four—silly me. We piled our bags onto the chair across from us while everyone watched with curiousity as we fumbled around trying to organize our giant bags. Just before the train departed, a husband and wife came to claim their seats, which were the ones we had taken, of course. I was grateful when the fellow traded tickets with us and took seat number 4 while we looked at the tickets sheeplishly and finally figured out how to read the character for seat number. Lesson learned.

As we arrived to Tianjin in the late afternoon, we were greeted warmly and driven through the city to the TUT campus. Driving through the city was an interesting, yet brief, taste of what our new neighbourhood looks like. I was almost startled by the blend of European and Chinese archetecture. I’m sure I’ll find lots of interesting things as time goes by. The campus is gated and the dorms are within these walls, which is good for safety. The biggest difference seems to be the height of buildings; everything is so much taller than in Canada, and I know it’s not just my imagination. We are very honoured by our dorm room. There are phones, seperate bedrooms, fridge, water-cooler, hot-plate for cooking, small washing machine with space to hang-dry, and lots of space. The campus also has much to offer, including stores, table-tennis, basketball, track, restaurants, and more. We were also honoured with a dinner tonight and learned that menus are not available in English here, so Ryan and I may order a different dish every day until we know what each one means, or find another way to learn. The eggplant here tastes dramatically different here and has a surprising amound of flavour; I would have never expected that.

I’m sure I will have many great adventures, but I won’t be writing them all online. Internet access is a little awkward, and I couldn’t afford to bring a computer with me, so my writing and posting of photos will slow down considerably. I’m also having difficulty accessing my email, so I hope my friends will understand why they don’t hear from me often.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 9:10 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.