During this trip from the airport to Beijing centre, I could just catch a glimpse of Chinese green landscape before diving into the urban atmosphere of Beijing. When I arrived at Gongzhufen station, I was amazed at all the big expressways around me (Gongzhufen seem to be kind of a hub for expressways!) and a bit lost among all the Chinese people everywhere (I was not used to it yet!). But Mrs Fan Yuan remarked me at once (were my luggage and my attitude so recognizable?) and we went together to the university. There, we first went to sixth floor where there were... 5 women for one man (how lucky ;-) ). The first thing I saw were the piles of Chinese study books on the tables and in the shelves : I didn't imagine there were so many, and I even saw Chinese study books for French that I didn't know they existed! I was introduced to everybody but the meeting was so sudden and brief I didn't have time to prepare and say an arrival speech... I was quite ill at ease in Chinese, I just told my name and that I was a French student, then I didn't know what to say! I thought "Wow, I will have to get used to living in China and speaking Chinese!"
We then went to eat lunch together ; time for me to learn all the names of Chinese food : meat, vegetables, soup... In the afternoon, I got acquainted with my future colleagues on the second floor, where all the videos are edited and were is packed all the stuff for shooting and recording programmes. Discovering a real movie studio was a great experience for me and I found the room very impressive. Seeing for the first time how people prepare, record and run a shooting in a studio was really interesting!
At the end of the day, Jia laoshi (well, I always called him that way!) and I went to his home by taxi (my luggage were really, really heavy...). His house is further from Beijing centre than the building of CRTVU, but the district is quite a nice place, with a supermarket and lots of small shops nearby. Of course, the roads are a bit dirty but after one or two days you don't mind. What's most horrible is that he lives on the sixth floor and as my luggage were heavy, we had difficulty bringing then to his home!
I met his wife, who speaks English quite well and I discovered my bedroom, the highest in the entire district, since it is on the seventh floor (actually, there were stairs to walk up to the room, that's why I call it the seventh-floor bedroom). After unpacking my luggage, and despite the jetlag, the warmth and the hardness of the bed (we French are not used to lying on small mattresses, we use thick ones...) , I slept perfectly that night... the only night I wasn't bitten by mosquitoes.
And when I woke up, I discovered Beijing for the first time : at 6:30, through the windows, I could already see lots of cars going here and there, bicycles recklessly overtaking buses and pedestrians, noises of shops and horns rising in the already warm atmosphere. I hadn't seen any French city wake up so early! And the clouds, unfortunately, were already there too.
To see more, please visit 杜敬修's space at: http://i.myechinese.com/index.php?s=/space/1170