Shijiazhuang

After a good night out in the village in Beijing on Saturday (hmm, I seem to be falling even further behind with these posts. Blame Mr. Black.), Phil & Rebecca, Kristy & Angie, and I went our separate ways. On Sunday morning I hopped on a bus bound for Shijiazhuang with the China 13 Corporate Service Corps team and said goodbye to Beijing. I had visited Beijing once before, in 2003, and I found this experience to be very different. My memory had Beijing absolutely filled with bicycles, and this time I saw relatively few – emphasis on “relatively.” And while crossing intersections is still an adventure, it doesn’t compare to the feeling I had in 2003 that there was a 50/50 chance I wouldn’t make it across in the bicycle rickshaw and the awe I felt when a sea of bikes would magically part every time a car came plowing through.

Perhaps the next time I visit Beijing it will have transformed again. As we drove south out of town evidence of further transformation was all around us. Texas-sized highway projects, enormous fields of rubble, high speed rail construction. And an incredible amount of cottonwood drifting between raindrops in the air. All along the highway to Shijiazhuang were rows of trees, neatly planted from four to twenty deep. They guarded the highway from the massive apartment complexes just outside of town, from the factory towns further south, and from the endless wheat fields interspersed along the way. They were infinite. I watched them through the rain and drifted off to sleep.

I awoke with a start to our bus driver laying on the horn. All I could see out my window was the side of a truck. It was raining harder now, all the windows were fogged up, and we were on the shoulder passing a pair of slow trucks, one hauling massive mechanical gear and the other highly piled crops of some sort under a tarp. A few rows behind me our Brazilian colleagues, Thiago and Carlos, were still trying to teach everyone Portuguese. I had already decided that I could go no further than “mano,” apparently short for something like hermano. My capacity for absorbing language was as waterlogged as the road down which we continued to swerve and honk.

Trees

When we arrived at Motel 168 in Shijiazhuang I felt like I was in college moving into the dorms, except that there were infinitely fewer places to store my clothes. Shijiazhuang was as foreign to an American as Texas was to a Wisconsinite. Luckily for me, Phil was busy chasing me down via train and arrived at the hotel late that night. For him it was a good excuse to come back to the town where he learned Mandarin – or at least a reasonable portion of it. A while back, when I told him I was going to spend a month in Shijiazhuang he thought I must have figured out which town he’d lived in and was making a lame attempt at a joke. His assessment of the town was slightly inconsistent with the Chinese waiter at a restaurant in Fresno who had told me it was “a tourist town, similar to San Francisco.”

So we set out to let me soak up some of Phil’s Shijiazhuang knowledge. We grabbed some food at the “boat restaurant” and then had a couple of drinks at the “stair bar.” He invited a former teacher of his to join us. We learned a lot about how one becomes a member of the Party. Fascinating. And I picked up cards written in Chinese for every place we stopped. It would be the only way I’d find my way back via taxi in the coming month.

At any rate, I was quickly settling in. The next day we would meet our clients. To add some drama before wrapping up this post, I’ll note that my colleague Sue has today posted the following: “another scary day with even more questions and problems of our customer.” What will my client be like? (Just to be clear, by now I know what my client is like, this is more of a question you might have in your head, only swapping “Dan’s” or “your” for “my” in that sentence.)

I think this is a picture of Shijiazhuang