I'm going to try to set these posts up in a daily fashion, one post for one day. But because of time zone changes, our two days of travel sort of meshed all into one really long day. So the first post shall consist of Sunday and Monday. China and Proctor are exactly 12 hours apart. So 12 PM on Sunday at Proctor is 12 AM on Monday in China. That was one of more simple preparations out of many for this two week trip. Sunday, March 12th is when our clocks are set forward one hour. This also happened to be the day we had to meet at Proctor for the trip. So we now faced the possibility of someone being an hour late. Awesome.
We had to meet at the Dining Hall parking lot at 3:15 AM, which really felt like 2:15 AM. Tired and restless I dragged myself over there. I was greeted by three Proctor mini-buses and several other students. Everyone seemed to have that face of "I'm awake and don't want to be." We took a two hour bus ride down to Boston which is now only a blur of a memory. Richard expressed his emotions at our arrival:
Everyone was on time including those meeting us at Boston, despite the one hour time change. Thank you to Kris for making that change very known to everyone. Check-in and security went quick and smooth. Thankfully no one seemed to have a razor blade or pin needle that the airport found lethal. As we took off from Boston, the sun started to rise.
We took an hour and a half flight from Boston to Newark. Once at Newark we had to wait several hours for our flight to Beijing. Some interesting scenes found my camera in those next few hours:
But we finally made it on the plane and departed by mid-day from Newark, set out on a 13 hour flight to Beijing! Woohoo!
The fastest way to get to China from New England is not going east or west, but in fact north – up and over the north pole. I know what your wondering... and the answer is yes, I did see Santa's workshop. It looked better in my imagination. For his privacy, I with withhold those pictures. But I did get some nice pictures of the arctic.... and for being a giant wasteland of ice and really cold water, I thought it looked pretty cool.
A few hours later I saw the sun set over the arctic tundra. OOoooOO.
We were working with time as we flew to China, so the night did not last very long. The next morning I was able to see the mountainous region of northern Russia.
Finally, after 13 hours, and what felt like 10 meals of plane food... we landed in Beijing around mid-day Monday.
We were greeted by Michael Hai, our currier who would be with us for the rest of the trip. We found out he hailed from Shanghai, and for being a native I thought his english was very good. Although it kinda needed to be... because if he didn't we would all be pretty screwed.
*Note: the text below this picture is for some reason not the same color as everything else. To read it, highlight the text. Sorry for the troubles.
On our way to the hotel we saw some very interesting buildings. This peculiar shaped building housed all of China's news network. Being a communist country, there is only one news channel.
Right across from our hotel was the China World Trade Center, definitely one of the bigger buildings in Beijing.
For dinner, Zack Lee's dad brought us to a local restaurant where we where able to watch the chefs make the food. To make the freshest of fresh noodles, one of the chef's took something similar to a carrot peeler to a block of dough, and flung the stringy pieces of dough strait into a ginormous pot of boiling water. Seen here:
And here is a fried chicken head. Awesome.
So, day one started to come to an end. Most of us were still jet lagged, and some were still trying to wrap their head around the fact that we were on the other side of the world. Our brains became sponges as we absorbed every piece of information we came to learn about this very foreign country. Now, I was The Foreigner. We all made it to our hotel rooms by 8 or 9 PM and very happily fell asleep a few hours later in our bed. The first time in about 24 hours.
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