First days in Beijing

I arrived in Beijing last Monday and I was both excited and anxious since it was my first time in Asia, that is in a completely different world. I would not say that my first approach was traumatic, probably because Cango’s volunteers helped us deal with the basic problems (such as reaching our flat or withdrawing money from our account) and Beijing is an international city; neverthless, I felt a little bit powerless because I could not communicate at all with people who do not speak English, therefore I had difficulty doing by myself even a simple thing such as choosing at the supermarket the kind of milk I prefer. But it turned out right, fortunately the milk I bought is really good.

Since the second day I was integrated immediately into Cango’s activities by participating in a very interesting conference about climate change. We met a lot of nice people who work for Cango’s partner associations and we made a trip to Fengning, a village in the north of Beijing. Traveling by bus I had the feeling that China is a sort of big building site: although we crossed a natural environment with only a few constructions, there were lots of works in progress to construct roads, buildings and other things. It seemed a constantly developing place, ready to join the modernity but also to destroy its beautiful nature.

One of the most amazing things I experienced during these days was lunch time at a Chinese restaurant. In a restaurant Chinese people do not order their own dishes, instead they take different kinds of food and share them each other. I think it is a nice way to make lunch a very shared moment because everybody is induced to pay attention to other people’s needs: you do not eat too much of a single dish because everyone may be interested in it or you leave your part of it to someone who does not eat other types of food (like vegetarians).

As for the rest, there are plenty of interesting and funny things to say: Chinese people use very little plates to eat, so little that it would be hard to put even a small slice of cake in there, they sell rice only in packages of 5 kilos, they stop you in the street just to take a picture together and above all they love my curly hair. I guess the fun just started.