China 2.0 Day -3: A Very Jing Start With Shel

The Jing. Beijing. I think @kaiserkuo pioneered the use of the term — and this thing has stuck with me. Afternoon. 15:20. Beijing Airport — Terminal 3.

I think my car zipped into Terminal 3 just minutes after Shel Israel’s (@shelisrael) UA flight touched down at the airport. The tweeting, lost since I just left home for a radio show recording earlier in the afternoon, promptly resumed. After waiting for Shel at the main exit for about 30 minutes, I shifted over to the Starbucks — as agreed. The tweeting started long before I headed for the Starbucks. It continued, only with greater momentum.

Just before 16:00, Shel dropped by the Starbucks. This was it.

This was something big for Shel — his first-ever trip to not just the Jing, but to the whole PRC. And this whole thing started at a Starbucks. What a homecoming for Shel. (I hear that cliché “home away from home” chime. Let’s just leave it at that.)

Interestingly enough, Shel made me aware that we pay more for our tea and coffee at Starbucks in the PRC than we pay State-side. This was never a David Feng issue. David Feng had been sipping away Short Earl Greys for the low price of CNY 12 since time immortal (can’t exactly remember when he stumbled upon the first Starbucks in the Chinese capital).

The econ talk shifted over, inevitably, to the Twitter chatter. Totally unbeknownst to me, I had managed to totally outtweet Shel. (At present, @christinelu and the @Scobleizer tweet more than I do, but let me make it clear that my mission is not to outtweet them with sub-optimal quality tweets or irrelevant / irreverent chatter about the Beijing Subway, long missed by quite a few.) I introduced him to my Twitter gang — Mainland China, Taiwan, the world over. The chatter went on for nearly an hour as Shel took particular note of my British accent.

(Oddly enough, I had just managed to fake an Aussie accent on radio merely hours earlier.)

The talk went on and on, but evidently, we weren’t going to spend our night at a Starbucks. We moved slowly to the car park where I had parked my car. On the way we saw just how big this T3 thingy could be. I reminded Shel that my first visit to T3 — on the day of its opening (February 29, 2008 for those keeping count) was just — with my mouth wide open as I marvelled for the first 30 minutes. It had come to set a first impression for the trip: Beijing, and China at that, was all about being big.

We made our way across the car park to my car. We zipped through the 2nd Airport Freeway, where we saw more and more of urban Beijing come into view. We had a bit of traditional architecture to start the tour — Shel promptly spotted the Red Sandalwood Museum just inside the eastern 5th Ring Road as we went on the Jingtong Expressway into central Beijing. Then, it was onto a very new, and a very modern, Beijing.

Ten minutes before reaching the hotel, Tower 3 of the China World Trade Tower started things up, and a few minutes later, the massive CCTV Big Shorts made its presence felt as the car zipped just past it. The Jing was becoming reality for Shel as our talk shifted into all different aspects.

Before long, Shel’s hotel loomed large and clear. Getting to the thing, though, was less than easy. The hotel was inconveniently located at the wrong side of the 2nd Ring Road, and it took a near 360° turn on Jianguomen Bridge to get us in the right position. Once we were there, we started missing crossings as I was just too hooked into telling Shel all about the Jing. Our Jing, it seemed, and the Jing for every last soul in the city. Not unexpectedly, Shel was informed that the closest Subway station was Jianguomen — a convenient (but not so once you’re deep underground, thanks to crazy interchange designs) interchange between the west-east Line 1 and the round-it-goes-in-circles Line 2.

Getting to the hotel itself was a challenge. I had no idea the hotel entrance was so — well, in fact, easy to find. (I thought it was through one of those crazy back doors — thanks to too much rides to dayuan complexes where finding the entrance proved to be harder than algebra to the average toddler.) It’s true that I’ve done 250,000 km+ by car in the Jing and just slightly less by Subway, but Dongbianmen and the nearby Beijing Railway Station still remains a “less lighted-up spot” to David Feng. As we made ourselves to loopy U-turn islands (thanks to less-than-ideal Beijing traffic management practises, where you had to continue ahead, turn right, U-turn and turn left again at a crossing where left turns and U-turns were banned), Georg Godula gave us a call. I blasted off with Georg in Swiss-German, positively overwhelming him and Christine Lu nearby (I guess). Shel was in direct contact with Georg and Christine as I took a wrong turning and reversed my way out of a crazy, dead-end Beijing hutong. The adventure had just begun.

Thanks to this thing called Twitter, @christinelu spilled the beans.

@thijsjacobs was totally shocked — he apparently knew me as a Subway kind of guy who also felt his way across every single new road that opened its doors to motorists in the Jing. But, oh well, as I remarked, there do occur cases where the Sun rises in the west — where the unexpected happened. Thankfully, we managed to find our way to the hotel — but not without a minor traffic offense: I drove (totally unbeknownst it seemed) on the bus lane. Not a big deal though — no cops — and we finally made it to the hotel.

Tomorrow it is then for a trip to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. I’m really looking forward to the whole China 2.0 thing. And with people as nice as Shel, we couldn’t have asked for a better start.

(Yes, even with the crazy driving. And the jokes Shel cracked.) ;-P