First Day Recap

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the delay in posting; I'm sure everyone (aka my mother) is chomping at the bit to hear our first impressions of China. So here's the problem. Our time here has been too hectic to reflect yet. But don't worry, as the pace of our life settles into a more mundane/realistic rhythm, the posts may change from oh-my-god-can-you-believe-what-crazy-things-happened-today to be more reflective. Having said that, in the next post, Alison will probs talk about our crazy adventures of today involving Chinese hospitals for foreigners who need health approval to live here...resulting in getting blood drawn for unknown reasons. Maybe I'll find out that I don't have syphillis/HIV or maybe I'll find out that my cholesterol is high--lord only know what they drew the blood for. At least they used disposable needles ;)

So, back to yesterday. We go to leave our hotel and grab our free water bottles to find...

...that PBR had entered into the Chinese bottled water business.

Because my Principal Investigator is at a meeting in another part of China, I don't officially start the research until August 24th, so I decided to accompany Alison to her office to have our first adventure in China together. It was a good decision. First, nearly every car that passed us was a taxi, but none were empty, so it took about 20 minutes to finally hail one. (It was worse than being stranded downtown at midnight in the rain in Manhattan). Then, we were betrayed by all of our guidebooks. Everything we read in our pre-trip preparation says that you need to have the address of where you're going written out in Chinese characters, and you simply give it to the cab driver in order to get there. We had the front desk do exactly that and entered the cab very confident. He then proceeded to call 3 different drivers to ask where to go and then resorted to driving in circles, stopping to ask pedestrians the correct address.

To make a long story short, we arrived after tipping the nice cabbie--ps: no tips in China. He was so very grateful that Alison and I figured we had made a tourist's mistake. Alison had her first meeting with her school people, and we learned that the districts that are between our job are very modern and foreigner-friendly (but not true expat communities--don't worry Mama). The best part is that they are by a subway station to take Alison to her job and by a bus stop that will take me directly to the hospital!

After lunch, Alison ran errands for work (all alone in Beijing!), and I took a taxi to the Cancer Hospital to meet with Dr. Shangying Hu (my twin, on right), Dr. Ron Li (Sarah's twin, on left), and Sarah. Here they are!
We then met with Dr. Zhao, the head of the cervical cancer research program there, had a tour of a hospital that was comfortably modern down one corridor and strikingly rural-Mexico-esque down the other. As in, they have a new 10-story beautiful surgical oncology building, but to get to it, you walk on a semi-paved pavilion and look into a shed where people are hang-drying what looks to be hospital pillow cases.

Fast forward 3 exhausting hours of cell-phone buying (you have to buy a phone then buy a number, and the prices are different based on how "lucky" the number is, because four in Chinese is pronounced similar to the word for death. We got the cheapest numbers, with 4s in them, bc I figured we'd have such bad accents no one would confuse the two words), picture taking for aforementioned hospital visit, and waiting for 30 minutes for a broken ATM to never be fixed. Ended up being majorly frustrated when we got home. But, we dined with my friend Kate at the most delicious restaurant in the Beijing in the nicest shopping mall I've ever seen (don't worry--everyone who comes to visit will be taken there). Peking duck is delicious! So the day ended up wonderfully. Here we are at Da Dong Peking Duck restaurant, after a grueling first day: