Arriving in Beijing and Saying Goodbye to My Bag

April 9, 2012 

I’m recommitting myself to the blog. You'll notice there's a good five or six weeks missing from my chronicles. I do hope at some point to go back and fill in the blanks, but in the meantime, I figured it was better just to pick up again where I am now. So here goes. 

I arrived in Beijing from Seoul on Sunday morning. My cousin Scott and his daughter Caroline met me at the airport. It’s the first time in my around-the-world trip that that I’ve been met at the airport by a friendly face, and it was really nice to spend Easter with Scott, Jennie, and their three girls. Sunday was a rare blue-skied day in Beijing, and between the blue sky and the suburban American-style house in the American-style suburb my cousins live in, it didn’t quite seem like I was in China. If it weren’t for the tuk-tuk parked in the driveway (The family took it for a spin while I napped.) and the bottled water used for rinsing vegetables and brushing teeth (It’s not actually parasites they’re worried about in the water. Rather, there are so many metals and other chemicals found in the water that the high school chemistry teacher has to have his students use bottled water in their experiments in order to get accurate readings.)

Monday’s activities made me feel a bit more like I was in a foreign country. Jennie and I took two of the girls to a doctor’s appointment. (I have to give it to Jennie for making her away around the city by car with her girls—I would have a hard time doing it on my own in a taxi.) After safely navigating the streets and highways where drivers use the shoulder as a regular lane, constantly swerve in and out of traffic, and tailgate those they can’t pass, we arrived at the unmarked set of buildings housing the doctor’s office. Once inside the building, Jennie sacrificed her body to keep the elevator from shutting on the children and me as evidently we were taking too long to get the stroller in and there were no sensors to cause the doors to reopen when something, like a stroller or child, gets in their path. We arrived on the nineteenth floor and exited into a completely dark corridor—definitely not in Kansas anymore. Fortunately, once we ascertained which door we wanted, we were welcomed into a light-filled, child-friendly office.

At this point, I was going to attempt traveling to the sports store to get some cold-weather gear for my impending trip to Mongolia and Siberia. Jennie and I had found and marked on a map the location of the store and a lady in the doctor’s office helped me with the name and address of the store written in Chinese. All I had to do was find a taxi. I was feeling confident in my ability to do so, especially as there was a line of them parked on the road outside the building, so I was genuinely shocked when the first taxi driver looked at the address, the map, and then me and laughed and told me (gestured?) he couldn’t help me. Undeterred, I went to the next taxi where I met the same reaction, and then to the next and the next. I have no idea why no one wanted to give me a ride, but in the end I decided to face those elevator doors again and just wait for Jennie to give me a ride there after her appointment.  Which she kindly did.

I made it to the sports store and managed to find a coat and boots. However, these new purchases pushed me into the there’s-no-way-all-my-things-are-going-to-fit-in-my-carryon-sized-travelbag category. To be honest, the small bag that I was so proud of fitting all my things into on the beginning of the trip had already split several places at the seams and was getting quite challenging to pack. I found the bag perfect when staying in one place for a while (which has been rare), and it’s fantastic  to carry from place to place as it’s so small, but packing it every day when I’m on the go has turned into a bit of a hassle. I had been thinking about leaving the bag behind when I was in Korea, I’d just grown quite attached to it and wasn’t ready to part with it permanently. And as I wasn’t sure how I would get it back to the states from there, it came with me. Now, with these new purchases, I didn’t really have an option; I needed to upgrade the bag. Jennie was kind enough to offer to pack it with their family’s things to go back to the US this summer, so I didn’t have to say goodbye permanently or try to mail it home. 

But, in order to do this, I did have to leave the bag at Jennie’s place before I had the chance to buy a new one. That meant I arrived at my hotel to meet my tour group with all my traveling possession in a plastic bag. Nice.