Day1 - A Shaky Start

14th March 2009

Singapore to Beijing

After curious wait for past two weeks, the day finally arrived. All packed, we locked our home and stepped out at 6.20am. The early morning walk with our backpacks for the first time on our shoulder seemed quite long. We were both thinking if we will be comfortable at carrying these backpacks around for the next two weeks. Meenakshi seemed more comfortable and determined. I was finding mine to be quite heavy and a little uncomfortable. Soon we would discover at the airport that the difference between our backpacks was not great. Mine weighed 11.6kgs with the day bag out and Meenakshi's was 8.0 kgs. By end of that day, I would have a blister on my left shoulder that would last our entire trip.

The MRT (S$6 for two tickets) from Buona Vista to the airport was a long journey. The train was considerably crowded at these early hours with a lot of school going children. We could see another backpacking couple in the other compartment. Once at the airport we rushed to Terminal 1. At the check-in we realized that I was not carrying the credit card which I had used for the booking. Surprisingly, this was an intentional move on our part to carry less stuff in our pockets and not to duplicate stuff. In this thoughtful smart move, I had left my most important credit card, and the ones I was carrying were all new and not tested. We ended up paying again for our tickets (though we would receive a refund of the previous booking), not the most favourable start to a shoe string trip. I also exchanged S$ 200 into Yuan, which would double the Yuans we would be carrying into Beijing.

We were finally off, on Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong and would then transfer to Dragon Air for Beijing. We spent a couple of hours at the Chep Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong, enjoyed some vegetarian Dim Sum (HK$ 30 from a food stall near the burger king) and browsed through a few shops. The Dragon Air flight was more eventful with an American guy and Singaporean girl sitting in seats behind us. They chatted non-stop for the entire journey and were loud enough for us to not be able to ignore their conversations. Their conversations mostly hovered around the American guys life in Beijing, his experience in a foreign city, his passion for staying indoors at home and cooking and his philosophies. I also caught up on a movie 'When the world Stoof Still'. I also spent some time reading through my research and understanding where and how to go in beijing and beyong. This is important to mention here because soon, we would land and I would forget all these important papers in flight. We would also learn that we left the Lonely Planet Trans Siberian at home too.

I was also excited to see how China looked from air. Very industrial, rigid residential blocks and wide roads. Most cities that we flew above had these same characteristics. The more traditional villages or village clusters in larger cities, were mostly had a square building profile with a courtyard in the middle. These would be mostly low rise.

The Beijing International Airport Terminal 3 is impressive. The use of red and the perfect curved forms are the highlights. I did not like the overall form from outside and that is because it is not continuous but is broken into three sections. That also makes the experience of going from one section to the other rather bad in the people movers. From inside, the use of bright orange is a nice shift from the more common white or aluminium/ alucobond finishes that most new airports have (this is not true for the new Madrid airport though). The roof and its curved from is absolutely amazing with the very thoughtful conical form of the columns that seem to disapper onto the roof. The skylights add a layer of texture to the undersurface.

As we walked in the architectural delight of the airport for immigration, we realized that we did not have a pen to fill in our immigration forms. Its not that we were'nt carrying any pens, we had around 6 of them, all types for simple writing to sketching, brush pens etc., but they were all in our checked-in backpacks. And so, we started our first language constrained conversation to borrow a pen. The immigration officers shunned us away and other travelers were too busy. We finally got a pen from our flight crew. When we were to write our place of stay in the form, it hit us, that we had left all our papers in the seat pocket in the plane. And I really mean all, because it had everything about beijing, how to go to Mongolia and where to stay in Irkutsk and Listvyanka. I rushed back to the plane only to find it standing deserted. It is at these moments that I hate the increasing efficiency of service. We had been out of our plane for only 20 minutes, and they had everything cleared up so fast.

Anyways, I was not too worried because I had emailed everything to myself and now that we were at the newest and most modern airport in the world, getting onto the internet would be a breeze. We cleared our immigration, picked up our bagagge and went into the arrival area to switch on our ipod touch and get on the internet. Boom... no connection, no wireless. We could see the brightly lit olympic rings outside which meant very high expectations from this city. But we could not find any internet on the airport or in the starbucks. Few helpful airport attendants directed us to a non-existent business center. We however finally ended up in some kind of an office in one of the back allies of airport shops. A room with two ladies, a computer, a printer, few chairs and a camera for taking passport pictures. They were kind enough to let us use their computer and printer. Phew, we made it and it was a fun little exercise to navigate through chinese versions of windows, google and word. I had used these softwares so many times, that I could do without reading anything on the screen. Finally after 12 hours of having left our home, we were back in action and excitedly venturing into a new territory.

We took the slow and strangely routed Airport Express (50 yuan for 2 tickets) into the city. I was observing the regimented north south housing blocks (which are a common feature in entire China for the strict building codes), wide streets and highways and bare trees and landscape. For the next 15 days, till the time we arrive back in Singapore, we will not be seeing a speck of green in our entire trip. Those who know Singapore (also themed rightly as Garden City) will understand the stark contrast in landscape from what we are used to. English announcements in train and English signaged made our journey into the city simple and easy. We switched trains at Dongzhimen and got onto line 2. Each ride in Beijing Metro costs 2 yuan. We changed again and now into line 5 to reach our destination station, Dengshikou. Surprising for a big city, the rolling stock was less wide than standard heavy rail MRT systems. Beijing residents also are very fond of black and black leather. One sees a swarm of human beings all dressed in black in the train. We were very loud in the that crowd with our red and blue jackets. For the first time, we observed that people found our Indian faces to stare at. The station and interchanges in Beijing are a system of long tunnels, that have that stale and burnt fuel kind of smell, something similat to older metro systems like those in new york city. For me its part of urbanity in a mature city, and in my humble opinion, Beijing qualified as one. In the next 22 hours in the city, I will discover more of the city and it will conform my opinion. However, a disclaimer here is needed because my opinion is largely based on my weekend experience, and it would be interesting to see how the city holds itself up on a normal weekday.

We stepped out of the station with usual tourist's disorientation. On top of that, this was the first time since Singapore that we were outside in non-conditioned environment. A change in termperature from 24deg to 0deg.