an Introvert in China

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22 March 2012, I arrived in the Beijing Capital International airport; alone and secretly petrified. Being a shy, introverted twenty five year old girl who wouldn’t say boo to a blind, geriatric chicken, let alone attempt to find my way through a Chinese speaking airport, ask for any directions or find my way to my hotel my nerves were on frayed ends. I love travelling, I love going away and exploring new places, seeing new sites and experiencing how the rest of the world lives. But underneath the guise of other peoples intrepid façade, I am also deeply terrified of travelling and paranoid that somehow there are people out there constantly out to get me and that I am always doomed to fail. I am not a natural traveller, my common sense is often lacking and I don’t seem to possess the innate skill or knowledge to string enough ideas together to formulate a plan to get myself the hell out of a tricky situation. So, weighed down by my large backpack kindly lent to me by my distinctly very natural-traveller friend Jess, I found myself in a strange, non-English speaking country, having to fend for myself and ensure I was on the ball at all times. Well, this is slightly exaggerated; all the sign posts in the airport had English translations, I was to join up with a group of other travellers in a hotel in Beijing to embark on our journey from the capital, through to southern China, and finally conclude in the pulsating Hong Kong. And I also had organised a transfer taxi in a last minute blind panic when tossing up the benefits of saving myself a few quid and hailing myself a regular taxi, or saving myself from an embarrassing panic attack from the prospect of getting lost in this unfamiliar place.



The direct 9 hour flight from London Heathrow to Beijing Capital International Airport went very smoothly, aside from my body’s tactless way of making new friends by forcing me to be sick. The poor young 13 year old Chinese girl sat next to me had at first been happily chatting to me and telling me of her studies in London. Naturally I had pulled the short straw and was allocated the centre seat, so at the crucial moment I was unable to leap over the sleeping young man to my left and make a heroic bolt for the (probably engaged) toilet. The young girl thankfully did her best to ignore my plight, engrossing herself in the animation game on her laptop and was still happy to speak to me even as we left the flight together and said goodbye at the customs sections as she made her way to through the “Chinese Citizens” check point and I to the tactfully labelled “Foreigners” que. I managed to find my beaming transfer driver in the hubbub of tourists in arrivals, my large backpack having kindly drawn the right sort of attention to me and together with a couple called Claire and Justin who were from Bournemouth, we were driven in a low speed, wacky-race deportment through Beijing directly to our hotel. This was when the first part of my fool-proof plan to scrap through my journey unscathed began to come undone – the name of the hotel on the smiley driver’s notice was different to the one that I had diligently taken note of (or rather, taken a photo of on my phone) from the itinerary and I attempted to assertively make my point that this was the wrong hotel for me and I should be going to the one I had noted down. The driver made some calls and by now, the alarm bells weren’t so much as ringing but were screaming ‘what the hell are you doing here, get back home now! You can’t do this, get out now! This was never a good idea, what on earth where you thinking, we’re all going to die!!!’ But Mr Smiley seemed to be giving me gestures of okness (his English didn’t stretch further than ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’) and so I gave myself a sharp talking to and deduced that I must be on a different tour to Justin and Claire, regardless of the tour having the same name and with the same Company.



In my typical family-inherited style, after Mr Smiley had dropped me off at my requested hotel and resumed his wacky-race to Justin and Claire’s, after some severe frowning and anxious flicks through their paperwork and swapping of reception staff it transpired that this hotel did indeed “have no reservation for me”. This had to be a well deserved shit the bed moment to start off any terrified tourist’s trip when they’re by themselves. I was alone in Beijing, I had no idea where in Beijing I actually was and didn’t catch (or rather, didn’t have time to take a photo of) the name of the actual hotel I should be staying at, and the driver had long since departed. The reception staff were invariably helpful and seemed worryingly concerned for me as if I had made a tremendous error that they were trying to keep me from knowing about in case I broke out into blubbering hysterics (which would have been a very accurate assumption to make, had this been their train of thought). Eventually, after my failed attempt at getting in contact with the travel company when it was about 4am UK time, one lady managed to make contact with a man who she thought might be my tour guide and after speaking to Andy on the phone, to my all encompassing sense of the biggest relief I have felt in a long time it turned out he was the man I was after! It was a solid stroke of luck that Andy happened to be a good friend of the kindly receptionist and had visited this hotel on previous tours. This lady and a male colleague of hers even went the extra mile and instead of sending me off in a taxi, they walked with me and carried my daypack for the 15 minute walk to the Beijing DongJiaoMinXiang Hotel. I could not have thanked them more for their gracious kindness in helping the terrified lost one and it put me in a good frame of mind of what some of the Chinese people might be like.



After checking into my hotel room, which at this time I had to myself as my room mate had not yet arrived from wherever she called home, my good intention of adjusting to the time zone quickly and having a power nap was entirely abolished and I ended up sleeping for the best part of my first afternoon in Beijing. I wasn’t certain if or when my roommate would arrive and I didn’t really want our first encounter to be with me partially comatosed and spluttering jibberish sleep talk, but at the same time after the broken few hours sleep on the plane the comforting cries of the large bed were too much to resist.



At 5pm, I forced myself out of bed and a few minutes after I received a ring on the doorbell and to my very pleasant surprise, I found it to be my friends Sarah and Ashley who had recently arrived from Vietnam. Sarah and Ashley had spent the past 2 months travelling around Asia on various organised trips and their final stop off was the 10 day tour of China and Hong Kong, which I was to join them on. I had sent Sarah a couple of panicked messages during the tentative wait in the wrong hotel’s lobby letting her know of my situation, not knowing what she could do about it given she was probably on a plane from Vietnam. Luckily for me, we managed to achieve our casual objective of meeting ‘somewhere in Beijing’ and I couldn’t help but be delighted by the fact the girls where staying in a hotel room a few doors down from me. I did feel sorry for them because it really was quite cold in Beijing, mainly from the formidable wind and they had only come with backpacks full of summer clothes and one set of joggers and a hoodie each. They were beautifully bronzed though, especially in contrast to my pale, waxen skin.

As it was dinner time, and I hadn’t eaten anything since the tuna salad sandwich just before the flight left Heathrow however long ago that was now and the girls hadn’t eaten since leaving Vietnam, we decided to brave the night and the cold outside and find ourselves our first real Chinese dinner. I was slightly ashamed of myself at this point because I had decided in my smalltown naivety that Big Bad Beijing would be far too terrifying and perilous for us to even attempt to navigate on our own, especially in the dark. Big respect to the girls because they just marched out of the hotel without a seconds thought of all these perceived risks and found us a small corner shop, a fruit stall selling the largest pink lady apples I’d ever seen and individually wrapped in a white foamy mesh, plus several restaurants. Slightly wary as to what the real Chinese food would actually be like, and the photos of the puffer fish, ox intestines and other treats normally associated with an animal’s rear end adding to the short-sighted wariness, we did manage to find ourselves a lovely restaurant decorated in green and white, with the waitresses uniform closely matching the dark green table cloths and I ordered myself a delicious chicken and shitake mushroom stirfry as the bargain price of 28 Yuan (about £2.80!). The fruit and snacks bought in the small corner shop were also incredibly cheap and helpfully, the Chinese (CNY) price were almost exactly 10 times more than the sterling equivalent (i.e 100 CNY would work out as GBP 10). So as far as my first night went, and with no thanks to my own inept fear of everything, I had to admit that we had done rather well. It did surprise me how many of the locals had difficulty in understanding us, I took it for granted that they would have a basic understanding of English, but we began to establish some form of communication with each other that consisted of nods, points, hand gestures and me speaking to them in English but, helpfully, doing so with a bogus foreign accent and missing out some of the more cumbersome grammar, as if my imitation of a foreigner will make me better understood. This is one of those paradoxes which I initially find pointless and irritating when other people do it, yet always seem to find myself slipping into doing habitually.



As the tour wasn’t starting until 6pm the next day, we decided it essential to see a panda in China and decided on a trip to the Beijing Zoo, against the better judgment of the lady in the hotel’s tourist room who claimed it “wasn’t a good season, too cold, they will be hiding.” Turning in that night, alone as my roommate had still to arrive, I whispered goodnight to noone in particular and settled myself down, hoping my body clock had adjusted to the 9 hour time difference.



23 March 2012: It hadn’t. I woke up at 4:30am and spent the next three hours failing to fall back asleep and gave up ungracefully, ratty and muttering petulantly at 7:30am. I met the girls at 9:30am after eating my shop-bought snacks of chocolate filled mini croissants and giant pink lady apple and we caught a taxi up to the Zoo, which was once again very cheap. Our first stop was the Giant Panda enclosure, and we weren’t disappointed as one of the beautiful animals (also known as Bamboo Bear or the Black and White Bear) was sat outside munching on his bamboo, posing shamelessly for the dozens of cameras. As with most tourist attractions, there was the obligatory tourist tat gift shop, selling hundred of identical panda-inspired items for the kids to nag their parents to buy for them. Being probably the only adults in the region with the mind-set of 8 year olds, we decided to each buy an identical novelty panda hat – practically, because despite the sun it was quite chilly, but primarily because we were tourists in China and therefore felt it natural to sport a headdress of the country’s national animal. This new look did get us many strange looks from the other visitors; I wasn’t entirely certain if this was because we were one of the only western people there, or if it was because we were wearing identical panda hats. But as things go in Beijing, I think the locals would be more likely to see somebody wearing Beijing Zoo head garnish than they would a trio of European girls out on their own in China. Perhaps the stares were a result of both – peculiar white foreigners with an odd fashion sense. It was here that I had my first encounter with the western-person-fascination-phenomena. A local man stealthily approached us and before we realised what was happening, thrust his young son into my arms and gibberished something in Mandarin which I deduced meant camera, as he and his friends proceeded to take photos of all three of us plus his confused son, following a few photos with the men and us. This was an odd experience, how intriguing it was that these men thought us so strange that they wanted to perhaps prove to other people what they had seen during their idle Thursday at the Zoo. So I’ve been told, the Chinese have often only seen Western people in adverts, television and movies so to see one in real life is perhaps a short-lived novelty.



Most of our day was spent visiting the various animals in the exceptionally large and spacious Zoo, stopping ever so often to take ridiculous photos with the animal statues. I imagined at peak season, all this space would be necessary but we were lucky to only be surrounded by perhaps a few hundred other tourists at any one time. As we couldn’t have photos with the actual animals, we made do with spooning the stone penguins, riding the shell of the giant tortoise and having my Guernsey Ted feign feeding from the enamelled nipples of the female stone gorilla.



The taxi ride back wasn’t as straight forward as we had hoped. There were many taxis around these parts, little yellow and green machines zipping in and out of the traffic and dodging any crossing pedestrians with the compassion of somebody being paid to closely shave the ankles of as many pedestrians as possible. However, most of them seemed disinclined to stop for us, and the two that did took one look at our hotel name on the business cards we’d been advised to take and waved at us disappointedly, as if we should have known for some mystifying reason that they couldn’t take us and were a major inconvenience to them. Deciding to try our luck on the other side of the road, hopefully facing the direction of our apparently elusive hotel, this gave us our first trip in the highway underpass and the (unofficial) cardboard petshop selling a number of cute little puppies and rabbit kittens. We didn’t have much more luck this side of the road with the taxis either, but eventually the one that did stop seemed to have harvested enough willpower to find us our hotel and even made a minimal effort to converse with us in what little English he knew.



After a quick stop at the shop to buy our breakfast for the morning (some instant chicken flavoured noodles and a packet of strawberry flavoured Oreo biscuits – I soon found that China is a utopia for Oreo lovers, with possibly every single flavour imaginable including Birthday Cake ‘flavour’), we spend some time chilling out in Sarah and Ashley’s room before meeting our tour group for the first time,



We met the tour group, plus our Chinese tour guide Andy in the lobby at 6pm, minus two of the travellers from Canada. At the time, Andy was unsure why they weren’t there and I did find it slightly odd that we were effectively leaving them to arrive alone whilst the rest of us introduced ourselves at a local restaurant over dinner. There was to be 12 “friends” travelling together through China (the term affectionately coined by Andy who wanted us to see him and each other as ‘new friends’ as opposed to a tour guide leading his heard of foreigners) from Beijing, through to Xi’an, Yangshao and finally, Hong Kong. Along with Andy, whose hometown is Xi’an, there was Adrienne from Canada, Justin and Claire (the couple who had shared my hapless airport transfer) from Bournemouth, Ellen and Linda from Germany, Laura from Scotland, Ashley who was from Hertfordshire and of course myself and Sarah taking one for the Guernsey team. I have a love hate relationship with having to tell people in more precise detail than “England” of where I live – on the one hand, I can never be bothered to over-explain that I live on a triangular spit of land within the Channel Islands archipelago that doesn’t show on the world map; yes the one with the cows, no I don’t mean Jersey, yes we do pay taxes, no it’s not a black listed tax haven and we do have electricity. But on the flipside, I sometimes like that it nearly always gauges a reaction out of people, either of interest or perplexed facial spasms but never the less, perhaps more interesting than telling strangers that you live in central London or Manchester (which of course to most Americans, is basically what the entire UK consists of)



Our first group dinner was our next encounter with real Chinese food, presented on a traditional circular table with a central glass spinning implement and served with a complimentary cup of jasmine tea. Without a doubt, this food was amazing. It consisting mostly of vegetarian dishes, which for me not being the biggest fan of vegetables was slightly offputting. But delightfully, I found the Chinese methods of flavouring up celery, green beans and aubergine really quite fantastic. The concept of actually enjoying vegetables, rather than consuming them as a necessity for normal bodily functions, had never crossed my carnivorous mind until now. The chopsticks were on the other hand, not so delightful. I had mastered my own technique of stumbling through a Chinese meal only spilling about half (gradually, this was reduced to a third) of it on the nice, white table cloth and the food reaching my mouth almost every time. The real way to eat with chopsticks I soon learned was rather different, a method that Andy courageously tried to demonstrate and was no less completely different to the special way I had perfected. I did try to do it the ‘proper’ way….alas, those 45 seconds were wasted as I quickly defaulted to my semi-well practised method and tried not to keep the waiting staff waiting too long after closing time as I haphazardly polished off my dinner that came to less than £5.

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