Finding Home Away From Home

By Sara Alterman
7/19/2008

I have to admit; I was completely unprepared to feel overwhelmed by Beijing.  Though it's my first time in Asia, I've traveled internationally (often by myself) many, many times, and I've always embraced each new

w country immediately, without any problems.  Maybe it's arrogant, but I wasn't expecting China to feel any different from my other travel endeavors.  Maybe a little daunting at first, a feeling which would be quickly quashed as I explored the city and began to memorize the landscape and the public transportation.

I could not have been more wrong.

For the first week and a half, I felt completely and totally at a loss. Before I got here, I imagined that Beijing would look more like China, with dynastic architecture and bustling narrow streets.  Instead, the Beijing I'd seen so far seemed an industrious chrome monolith, a Jetsons version of an Asian metropolis.  This city is enormous, the social interactions bizarre and confusing, the subway a labyrinth, the food a mystery.  Usually when I'm in a new place I soak up as much as humanly possible, barely spending any time in my hotel or hostel, eager to do anything and everything. I've already spent two entire days holed up in my dorm in Beijing, terrified of what lies beyond the boundaries of the CUC campus.

Thankfully, this week, there was a turning point.

I dragged myself out of the dorm to look for an English-language bookstore, and accidentally found the China that I'd been hoping to see.

After spending some time at the bookstore, Katrina (McIsaac) and I set out to find a vegetarian restaurant, a quest that seems damn near impossible in this city of enthusiastic omnivores.  Bumbling along with a cheap paper map, we turned down a side street and began to notice that the mobile phone stores and dirty bus stops gave way to impossibly narrow alleyways leading to quaint little hutongs (a jumble of courtyard residences), street food vendors, tiny old women wheeling their wares home on rickety bicycles.  The people we encountered didn't stare at the foreigners, didn't try to entice us into their shops, didn't scream at us to "come eat here now, lady!" as so many Chinese have done so far.  They simply went about their lives, making their way through their familiar streets and heading home for dinner. 

Whether or not this serendipitous find is representative of a stable microcosm of Beijing, or of a Beijing that is quickly giving way to modernity and economic development, I really can't say.  What I do know is that seeing so many people seem so at home made me feel as though I were, too.