Because I like to be Fair and Balanced, here’re some reasons why China is incredible.
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Free food is good food
Chinese food is, for the most part, absolutely awesome. I haven’t really had a bad meal yet except for a mishap at the forbidden city when I botched some Chinese and ordered the wrong thing. Wound up with like some bizarre really-tough-meat dish that was just a problem. The vast majority of the time though, the food is delicious. We also get these free lunches every day, which have been a great way to expose oneself to new foods that wouldn’t necessarily get ordered otherwise. I’ve found some bizarre but tasty new dishes in this fashion. Aside from this kind of food, there’re also bakeries and ramen shops and all sorts of restaurants scattered around campus. Tomorrow we even get access to the university dining halls, which are, as always, stupidly cheap.
The Tsinghua campus is a great place to live. We’re in a section of the school where all the roads are closed off to cars, so there are just fleets of bikes rolling around everywhere — getting around on a campus that’s nearly the size of UT is, therefore, shockingly easy and convenient. Also, our school is built on the site of the royal garden of the Qing dynasty (清华园), which ended in 1911. Consequently you’ll be biking around and just randomly discover parts of the old garden, which are beautiful. Beyond that, the campus also has lots of supermarkets, bike repair shops, banks, and really everything else. If it weren’t for how awesome Beijing is, there’d never be any reason to leave the campus at all, which brings me to…- The city.
This is a 15 minute bike ride from the lake above
Say you need a new cord for your Nintendo wii. Say you need a club where the entire dancefloor bounces up and down. Maybe you just want to go watch a world cup game on the lagoon in hohai. Or you want to eat at Pizza Hut. Or you want to go to the forbidden city, or the summer palace. Or see your friends at Beijing U. For the most part, this is 10 kuai — about $1.50 — away. Going down by tiananmen will run you around 45 kuai on the outside, a bank-breaking eight bucks. I’ve been here 4 full days. Haven’t even THOUGHT of going back to the same place twice. For food, for shopping, for anything. There is just so much stuff so close, it’s mind boggling. For instance, I wanted an electronic dictionary yesterday. So we biked over to a gigantic electronics warehouse maybe twenty minutes from our dorm, and got one. This store was incredible — if it was electronic, you could get it… if you were willing to do some
- Haggling.
Jackie with the dictionary, in front of the store he conquered.
A huge cultural adjustment to make when coming to China, I’ve gradually come to realize that for the most part, price tags are meaningless. Aside from big department stores and fancy restaurants, you can ALWAYS bargain to get better prices. Considering that the prices here seem three or four times too low already, this is a little weird at first. For instance, my bike would have cost 200 kuai, but because six of us were buying and we all threatened to walk away, we got it down to 140 a piece, with a lock and basket thrown in for free. 200 kuai is only thirty dollars. But taking that price would have been ridiculous — why pay thirty when you can get twenty, plus a good lock? The guys at the electronics store tried to sell me my dictionary for 1000 kuai, or 150 bucks. Similar products in the US cost about 200. 1000 kuai is ostensibly an OK deal. However, I had a secret weapon named Jackie, who speaks fluent Chinese. He wore the increasingly-angry frustrated salesmen (I was about to pay the thousand) down a hundred kuai at a time, until it was down to 700, their ‘lowest price.’ Jackie then mentioned that there were 49 other kids looking for dictionaries who lived fifteen minutes away. I ended up paying 630 kuai, Jackie having singlehandedly saved me $55 USD.
- The way batteries are sold. Oh, so you’re buying batteries? Surely you will be more willing to favor our brand if we throw in a gluestick or pocket knife in the package, right?
