Eric's Beijing Diary

It's fun to go, but it always feels good to come home. Of course the first problem to solve when it's time to come home is to get to Narita. Narita, as mentioned before, is identified as the international airport for Tokyo, but it is nowhere near Tokyo. I decided to take the bus this time, just to do something different. Actually, Mark's place is in the western part of Tokyo, so he is pretty near the Kichijoji station, which has a bus that goes straight to Narita. Mark and Tatsuhiko went with me to the Kichijoji station were we ran into a future ICU student at a croissant shop. We had a very interesting discussion about bi-cultural experience while we were waiting for the bus. The prospective student had lived in the US for a bunch of years, and was a native speaker of English. Tatsuhiko did not go to the US until he was in high school, but still became a native speaker of English. Mark was born in Japan, grew up in the States, and now has lived in Japan for many years. And I, of course, grew up in both the US and Japan. I would generally say that you should give the bus a little extra time, because busses ( in contrast to trains ) are traffic dependent. But it turns out that the bus schedule takes care of that. It is listed as a two-hour trip, but it took me an hour-and-a-half. It was a very nice ride. Still, I do prefer trains. We faced a strong headwind, so the flight was a little longer coming back this way. I got in late last night. Good to be back. I like Tokyo. It's an interesting place. And you will not be in trouble if you avoid taxis like the plague. Still, when it comes to everyday living, Beijing is much simpler. Beijing feels like a small town compared to Tokyo. It's a lot easier to get by. Every street has a bicycle lane, so even the worst part of rush hour is usually not that bad (except for the motorcycles that like to use the bicycle lane to get around traffic). There is another interesting thing about living in North China. China has an old rule that is still followed today. All public buildings north of the Yangtze River are equipped with a hot water boiler. Every room in the building has hot water radiators. If you live south of the Yangtze, no such luck. Nowadays the buildings all over have wall mounted air conditioning units which double as heaters in cold weather. I find them to be fairly good as air conditioners, but not that good as heaters. I have never been fond of convection heat. As soon as they start pumping the hot water through the pipes the beginning of November, I turn off the conditioning unit. In Japan, public buildings are heated, but central heating in private homes is still considered a luxury. So while Tokyo is warmer than Beijing during the day, you feel the cold more, because your home is cold at night. My apartment is warm all the time. Not what I would call hot, but never chilly. If I am working around the house, then I sometimes wear a sweatshirt, and I do have warm blankets at night when it cools down a bit. But basically, the inside temperature is comfortable. So living in Beijing as a single person is simpler than living in Tokyo. When it comes to people, though, China is much more complicated than Japan. Japan is a homogeneous culture. China is enormously diverse. There are lots of different kinds of people in China. I suppose I notice it more, because there are people from all over the world in Beijing. But it's more than that. Even without all the internationals, there are people from all over China in Beijing, and China is a very big country. In fact, even though America has long been called a melting pot, I would say that today, Beijing is more of a melting pot than the US. There are 55 minorities in China. But even among the Han, there is enormous diversity. Different dialects, different cuisines, different life styles, and different religions (although I would say that Buddhism in some form is the predominant folk religion of China). The one thing about Tokyo that you don't really see that much in China are the abundant onsen (hot spring baths). When I was a kid, the onsen were all up in the mountains, because that's were the hot water veins are close to the surface. But now, the technology is available to locate the water veins and drill down to them. So you can build an onsen anywhere you want, as long as you drill deep enough. I have heard of hot springs in China, and I have been to a couple in the US, but nobody does it like the Japanese. The onsen will always draw me back to Tokyo.

Labels: Japan