So, I got back to Qingdao from Beijing this morning at 8 am. That would have been convenient, except for this:
I will explain this soon...
When I got to Beijing Wednesday night around midnight, I stayed at a hostel right beside Beijing South Railway Station, which is where the D-Train (the fast one) stations. The next day, I moved to Peking University Youth Hostel, which is right across the street from Tsinghua University where the conference was held. I met Wang Ning and Helen Zhang, the two people in charge of the international participants, and then Helen took me on a quick tour of Tsinghua's really pretty campus.
Following my brief introduction to China's best university, I had some free time to explore downtown Beijing, specifically the Tian'anmen Square area. I visited the Forbidden City, which was covered in green mesh and bamboo ladders as China prepares for the 2010 World Expo. No surprise there. Olympics, take 2. Some woman walked in front of me while I was taking a picture with Chairman Mao Zedong, and I obviously was not happy about that. You'd think the photographer would have taken the picture when I wasn't casting a loathsome glance at an innocent passerby. Skillz? Perhaps.
I also walked around the Great Hall of the People. The National Museum of China is also closed for "renovations" or something like that. A shame.
The actual conference started on Friday with a meeting for all the international participants who were somewhat new to Beijing or even China. Saturday morning at 7:30, we hit the ground running to register for the event at Tsinghua University's main building.
The conference brought together a lot of students from around the world (every continent was represented, and a handful of participants had been to Antarctica). We talked about how necessary it is to make the older generations see what the future will look like if we don't take some serious steps to combat climate change.
The focus of the conference was China, but the organizers wanted input from all around the world. It was really exciting to see China's youth stepping up to push their agenda. One of the main themes of the conference was making sure China and the world's youth are represented in Copenhagen at the end of this year when a new environmental pact will be finalized.
It's hard to put the conference into the blog, but I'll write something about it for the Chickasaw Journal very soon. Before I left on Sunday, I went with some new friends to Tsinghua University's famous Tsinghua Park.
I guess this is my sad plea to everyone: Write to your senator and to the President and
ask demand that they do something to combat climate change. I saw some guy wearing a shirt on the first day of the conference that said "How old will you be in 2050?" (that's the year most countries are using as an achievement marker). I thought about it. I'll be 61. The next day, I was still thinking about it. My children will probably be in their thirties. My grandchildren will be in elementary school. My parents will be 90ish. And if we don't act now, we'll all be suffocating in our day-to-day activities. Not to mention we're killing everything natural that there is to love about our planet.
So now for the train story...When I bought my ticket Thursday afternoon, the service lady at the ticket counter told me that they were out of seats but that they had some standing-room-only tickets. "No, thank you. I'll spend a little more money and fly to Qingdao. I am not standing on a smelly Chinese train for 10 hours." However, she promised me that once I got on the train, I would be able to pay 50 or 60 RMB and buy an empty seat. "There are always plenty of empty seats," she assured me.
False. There were probably 2 people standing for every three people sitting. Not only was it a horrible fire hazard, I started to get claustrophobic. People were sleeping in bathrooms, in the luggage racks, on the floors, under the seats... The first seven cars were packed like sardine cans and I was in the middle of it all.
Not surprisingly, I was the only foreigner, which basically meant I was a zoo animal. I begged for a seat. I offered money for a seat. I would have danced for a seat. Needless to say, they were unwilling to give up their seats.
About 2:30 am, I started to get cranky. Children (why they were still awake, I will never know) were screaming and apparently had mistaken my hands for a warm carpet or a nice pair of socks - Note: I was one of those people who was trying to sleep on the floor, since I had class this morning at 8:30 am.
After giving a few menacing stairs, lying about my newly created assistant professorship at Fudan University and my degree in British Literature from Harvard, and yelling at a man in eloquent (read: not eloquent) Chinese about why he shouldn't sleep where I'm trying to use the restroom, the service lady realized that I might be better off in a bed. Ten minutes and 60 RMB later, I was on the third bunk of the number 12 car sleeping like a log.
Moral of this story? Fly when you are in China. Or buy your tickets as far in advance as you can. And don't believe what anyone tells you, because chances are they probably don't really know.
Beijing was fun. The conference was an awesome experience that opened my eyes to a new reality, as well as a lot of doors for the future. But I'm running off of less than 4 hours of sleep after a pretty exhausting weekend, so I'm going to take a nap for 10 or 12 hours now.
拜拜
