Mutterings and Musings

Beijing

Challenge: Write about some of your most memorable vacations. Where did you go? Who were you with? What was your favorite part of the trip?

I love travel. Absolutely, utterly adore exploring new places. I imagine it's a backlash against my childhood when we went away on a family holiday once a year, always to one of the two same places (either a caravan park in Wales or a B&B farmstead* in Somerset). Any other holidays were invariably staying with other parts of the family.**

I was in my twenties before I had my first passport.

That being said, my very first trip abroad was to China for a month. Two of my uni friends (both post-graduates, whilst I was a fresher) were from Beijing; both returned there to live after graduation, the one immediately after and the other a few months later. Vivian, the second friend, invited me to come and stay with her family for a while. We met up at Heathrow and flew out together; my first ever flight on anything bigger than a four-seater and it was fourteen hours on a Boeing 747

We arrived in Beijing severely jet-lagged. So much so in fact that Vivian had forgotten all her native Mandarin and was staring round the airport bleary eyed trying not to cry. Somehow (there wasn't much English on the signs) I managed to find our way out and re-unite her with her parents (who spoke almost as much English as I did Mandarin. i.e. bugger all.).

Beijing was a baptism of fire. Almost everyone over the age of 40 that Vivian introduced me to, spoke no English. Her grandmother (possibly the tiniest, wrinkliest little old lady I had ever seen), wondered around the flat in just a small pair of cotton shorts complaining about the heat, muttering at the newspaper (she couldn't read), and finding it completely incomprehensible that I was a fellow human and yet spoke no Mandarin. Nainai was probably the biggest culture shock I've ever had in my life, and I suspect I was to her too.



*We lived on a farm anyway. So whilst this was nice, it wasn't exactly exciting.**Most of them lived on farms too.