Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Bombay

From Hong Kong I took a flight aboard Kingfisher Airlines to a heretofore brand new country, India and it's economic capital, Mumbai, to see Komal. There's quite a bit of confusion over the name of the city, which is officially Mumbai now but used to be Bombay. The switch in its English name happened in 1995. While the different names have their own political implications which I know little about, Komal and her friends call it Bombay, and so I call it that too. Depending on your definition of a city, Bombay is as high as the 2nd most populous city in the world. Without going into semantics, Bombay seemed to me to be at the same level of immense urban sprawl and density as Beijing and Shanghai and a level above New York and Hong Kong. The city is very much a coastal city, shaped like a sharp peninsula extending into the Arabian Sea. Downtown Bombay is located towards the point of the peninsula and the suburbs are located more inland.

I had a little adventure getting my Indian Visa. I went to the Consulate in Beijing about a week and a half before I was to leave. After initially going to the Embassy by mistake, then waiting for half an hour in a small room and then dealing with Chinese paperwork with the Consulate workers (all Chinese), I was finally told that they'd process everything in 10 days. I did some quick math and realized that the 10 day mark would be the Friday before my Sunday flight. If they were even a day late, I would not have my Visa, or more importantly, the US Passport that would go with it. After the panic subsided, I found out the phone number for the Indian consulate in Hong Kong, where I would be spending 3 days, and called them to see how quickly they could process a visa. They said that if I had a HK ID, they could process it in a day or two. Luckily I did have the ID, whew! I was able to bolt from the Beijing consulate.

The Hong Kong consulate visit was very painless. The person before me was an Indian man who spoke fluent Cantonese, which is always cool. So before I knew it I was on a six hour plane ride to India. Though it might not be intuitive, Hong Kong to Mumbai is further away than New York to LA. This plane ride was my first indication that I was journeying to a strange new land. The full airliner had maybe 3 Chinese people, maybe 3 white people. The rest of the airplane was all Indian. We all had television monitors in front of us with a nice selection of Bollywood and Hollywood. The woman next to me seemed to be watching an awesome Bollywood film, but every single time I picked a Bollywood film, it sucked. I ended up watching Chariots of Fire, which also did not live up to the hype generated by its theme song. Walking to the bathroom, I noticed that nearly every single monitor was tuned into Bollywood - just one was bucking the trend, showing Friends.

I asked the woman next to me how she enjoyed Hong Kong. She told me that it was nice, but very dry. "I beg you pardon?" I couldn't believe her. Hong Kong was the most humid place I
have ever been - it makes DC seem drier than a medieval history lecture. Then I stepped out of the plane, got hit by a tidal wave of humidity, and I figured out what she meant. It's hard to put into words the intensity of Bombay's marshlike air. Come to think of it, I've never been in a marsh, but I imagine one feels a little like Bombay. It wasn't quite a sauna but you could definitely feel the air.

Then I got my bags and went through immigration and without a cell phone, walked out of the airport hoping there'd be someone waiting for me. Luckily Komal was, with a driver, and we left for her father's apartment in Malabar Hill. Now although I did not see an elephant during the weekend, I do realize that there is an elephant in the room. With full regard to that, I need to say that my relationship with Komal officially ended during that car ride from the airport, and yes it did suck. I had had the whole summer to deal with this so it wasn't as difficult, but it certainly led to one of the most unusual weekends I think I will ever experience. For the first time in a long time, I was legitimately scared. I was in a very large city in a very foreign land around which I did not know how to navigate. But the worst part was that the uncertainty in my physical environment was matched by the uncertainty in my personal life and I would not wish that combination upon anybody.

However I was in a cool foreign city with a good friend and it was a pretty special opportunity. Komal's apartment was incredible, honestly the most amazing apartment I had ever been in, and staffed with several residing workers who didn't speak any English. A full two stories of marble floor overlooking the beach, the apartment was fit for a real estate mogul. Early the next morning though, Komal had work and I was left alone in the most foreign of homes. Though I was very comfortable in this mini palace, armed with the Hindi words for food and water if I needed sustenance, I constantly felt uncomfortable. I felt that as I was in such a different place I should go out and explore, but my lack of phone, language skills and familiarity with the surroundings made this a bigger difficulty than ever before. It was one thing to lodge in a hostel and be given free reign but I was staying in an apartment with police officers continually camped outside and I couldn't exactly leave and come back whenever I wanted. So I took a quick walk along the beach, which was pleasant but extremely dirty, and waited until Komal's driver came. By now used to communicating without full verbal fluency, I got the point across that I wanted to see the
Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal, and so he dropped me o
ff there and presumably went to find parking nearby. Again for all I knew I could have been stranded there with only a faint idea of how to get back, but I proceeded to walk around and admire some of the finest sites that Bombay had to offer. The Gateway is a large stone arch structure built to welcome Queen Mary and King George's visit to the city. It does impressively stand out on the water and I'm sure the sight is rather spectacular coming at the end of a long sea storage. I managed to find some Taiwanese businessmen and asked them to take a picture of me in front of the arch.

I found the neighboring Taj Mahal Palace & Tower (hotel named after the more famous
mausoleum in Agra) even more impressive. The Taj was probably the most iconic building to get hit by the 2008 terrorist attacks, and the image of the structure burning is still engrained in my mind. I think the building is beautiful with Indian-style minarets and classical-looking stone structure. I'm no expert on Indian architecture but I just thought that that building fit in so well there as a symbol of Indian grandeur. The Palace didn't actually completely reopen until about two weeks after I visited.

I got beset by a beggar while staring at the Taj who asked me to buy milk for her starving baby. I had never quite seen this particular approach but she was so stubborn that I considered just doing it for her. Then she said come walk with me and started walking towards lesser crowded places. I have no idea what her true intentions were but red alerts blared in my head and I stood firm, tossed her 60 rupees and ran for my driver.

That night out one of Komal's friend's drivers was on duty so he was able to shuttle us around to different spots. I'm not sure how many peoples' nights outs revolve around personal drivers but it was very much the norm here. We first went to a country club where I sampled the
legendary Indian Chinese food. I had heard glowing reviews from Indian people about the Chinese cuisine brewed within their borders, but having just come from the Chinese capital and not seeing a single Chinese person I was skeptical. Nonetheless I was very much surprised - the dumplings there were particularly good. I also sampled an Indian Coca-Cola knockoff (later bought by the Coca-Cola company) called Thums Up. I noticed there was no B, which apparently was news to Komal and one of her friends. We then went to a slick new club which apparently had a cover charge of like 3000 Rupees which is an absurd $66. Maybe I have that number wrong but it was definitely the steepest cover I had ever seen outside of New Year's Eve. However, one of Komal's friends who knew the club owner was having her birthday there and thus we entered for free so yeah pretty sweet deal. Believe it or not, people dance in the clubs there like they do in Bollywood movies.

That may or may not be true but you should at least pass my little tidbit along to other people.

Okay so that was fun. Anyways just about nobody wears short sleeves in Bombay, ever, and certainly not at a nightclub. So despite the earth-shattering humidity, I manned up and wore a nice button-down long sleeve and the one pair of jeans that I had brought to China, though I'm the kind of guy who prefers comfort over style and always wore shorts into Vic's. I write this now with an awareness that this is much ado about nothing, but I think that in the American culture in which I was raised, we are taught to be afraid of the elements. We blast AC during the summer and heating during the winter, and complain loudly whenever we have to do without them. But of course large portions of the globe live their entire lives in weather either hotter or colder than we ever experience and consider it simply the norm. At the least, I didn't hear a whole lot of weather complaints from locals in Beijing or Bombay.

Over the rest of the weekend, I experienced a minor monsoon (felt like a Noreaster), saw a Bollywood film to get in the spirit, went shopping for some fine Indian cotton, entered Victoria Terminus aka Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, aka the train station at the end of Slumdog Millionaire where Jamal meets Latika. The train station was actually a tremendous experience besides for the cinematic experience (I wasn't even sure that it was the station from the film while I visited). First, its exterior, designed in Victorian Gothic style but with decidedly South Asian elements, was an amazing display of architecture. But the interior held more stories than the glorified facade. I had used the train stations in Beijing this summer and nothing stateside had prepared me for those crowds, but that paled in comparison to the bustle ongoing at VT on that rainy day. The outside was a zoo of stubby black cabs, and the inside was a jumble of sales transactions, hurrying passengers, departing trains, trilingual announcements and security, for this was the most deadly location for the 2008 attacks. Seeing the crush of humanity in person, it is actually painful to imagine the effects of a gunmen entering and opening fire. Mumbai apparently doesn't or didn't have a fully operational metro system, and intracity transit (as well as intercity) was mostly done with the suburban rail system. That was how Anish moved around from his spot up north in Santacruz near the airport into the downtown. I could wax on and on about my thoughts inside the station, and indeed I would need to spend more time in Bombay to fully understand them. But perhaps the most significant to me was that all the cars were gender segregated. Indian society is run with a moral mandate, and in addition to a strict no kissing in public, men and women are only allowed in separate cars. The station was also very filthy - the monsoons seemed to only spread the city's dirt around rather than the cleanse it.

What I heard from Anish's experience was also pretty incredible. A second generation English citizen of Gujarati descent, Anish was in suburban Mumbai for the year doing Teach for India, which is exactly like Teach for America except that while America has drastic educational deficiencies for a first world country, India has drastic educational deficiencies period. While many American high schools have awful dropout rates, more than 1 in 3 children in India drop out before the FIFTH GRADE. So yeah I think it's safe to say it's a completely different game. Plus though I think Anish teaches in English and doesn't speak much Hindi, all the kids are still learning the language. Oh and the pay is even worse. Suffice to say it was very interesting meeting up with him, particularly since I found his experience as a British-Indian, who spoke Gujarati and now learning Hindi, living and working in his ancestral homeland's largest city very analogous to my experience in China.

Indeed, as my experiences with large world cities in developing countries is very limited, I could not help but to conceptualize Bombay through my understanding of Beijing. Both gigantic Asian world cities of 18 million plus have migrants from all over the country and investment from all over the world. Each city has their impressive skyscrapers, each city has their difficult slum conditions and both definitely face overcrowding and urban sprawl dilemmas. Both countries have booming economies and over a billion people, and face similar social, energy and political issues accordingly. Also in both cities I had great meals. However, differences in foreign domination, internal political movements, religious movements and even climate have molded the two cities and countries into perhaps fundamentally different places. Even in three days, I experienced some of these differences. I would like to preface that I'm not sure how well Bombay can act as a microcosm for greater India, or even Beijing for China, but I do believe that both cities in some way contain a large portion of their nation's cultural heart.

Anyone who knows me well knows how much I like diversity. On this measure, I loved Bombay. Coming from Beijing, where my even slightly ambiguous racial features had occasionally drawn attention, I fully expected to stand out like a sore thumb among the considerably darker Bombay populace. Not even slightly true. There was not a single instance where I thought anybody gave me an unusual glance, questioning why I was in their land. You may think to yourself, "I'd hope not! I'd hope people don't act like that in a large cosmopolitan city." But still, people in Beijing who have surely seen members of every nation still occasionally gawk at the tall Westerner or ask the African-American to pose for a photograph. I bet every single white or black American who has ever spent a week in China has a story like this. However, I don't know whether they have those stories in India. What led to Bombay's more casual acceptance of foreigners in its midst? The answer is likely twofold. First, while China closed its doors to outsiders for so long, India has historically had more foreign contact including nearly continuous foreign influence from the Persians to the British. Second, the country itself is extremely diverse. Sure China has over 50 minority groups, but the country is still about 92% Han Chinese, and the great Eastern cities like Beijing and Shanghai even more Han. Meanwhile, India does not even classify its population among racial lines. South Asians seem to have a different conception of race. In the United States, would pan-ethnically self-identify as "brown" in a way that Koreans, Japanese and Chinese would never self-identify as "yellow." Even further, many Indians are decidedly "not brown." Many people were clear to point out to me that I could conceivably have been from the northeast of the country where the inhabitants have more East Asian features. Did you know that Burma was once a part of British India and could have been part of the modern state? This great diversity is very much manifested in modern day Bombay.

As a result, demographics in India are more commonly drawn by language, where there is clearly no majority. While Hindi is perhaps a lingua franca in Northern India and is spread greatly by its use in Bollywood films, the South largely speak completely unrelated Dravidian languages. Other related Indo-Aryan languages like Marathi and Gujarati are spoken by large chunks of people. I don't know too much about this language family, but I think perhaps that these languages are perhaps about as related as Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese and the Chinese dialects are. Though there is a lot of differences between these "dialects," it is taught in China that they are all part of the Chinese language. In India, there is no such conception of an "Indian" language. Even the language situation in Bombay confused me. Set in Maharashtra, the area traditionally spoke Marathi. However it seems that monolingual Marathi speakers are very much the exception now, "mostly fishermen," one of Komal's friends told me. Hindi seemed to be the language on the streets and in the media. However, certainly within Komal's circle of friends, English was far and away the most spoken language. In fact, one of her friends was an aspiring actor and taking "accent classes." When I asked him what was wrong with his accent, for his English seemed very good, he admitted that his Hindi was not where it should be and that he had a Hindi coach. Here I drew parallels to my knowledge of Hong Kong, where a similar colonial heritage has pushed English to its high status as the white collar and upper class language. However I don't think the situation is as similar as it would appear. In Hong Kong, many local kids who go to international school will speak English with an American or British accent and their international classmates will likely speak no Cantonese. Other locals may speak less fluent English and a large portion of the poor working class will speak little to no English. You either speak "mainstream" English, or you speak bad English. Hong Kong doesn't entirely have its own brand of English like Indian English. I believe the reason here is that in Hong Kong, English is used to communicate with the city's many Westerners, but communication with other Chinese will be done in Cantonese or Mandarin. In India, English is more than any other language the country's lingua franca, so there is plenty of communication with other Indians done in English. As a result, many street beggars came to me begging in English, which I hadn't heard in either Beijing or Hong Kong.

Decades of very different political rule has surely left other legacies upon China and India. I didn't see any of the slums in Bombay, but I still have the impression that the gap between the rich and poor is more pronounced in India than in China. I also definitely felt less safe in some parts of Bombay that I really ever have; for all its problems, Beijing is a surprisingly safe city.

Religious is perhaps the aspect of greatest divergence between China and India. It would be an oversimplification to say that organized religion had no effect on modern Chinese life, but compared to India that's almost a fair statement. The sheer number and visibility of religious groups in Bombay really struck me. When I was alone with Komal's driver, the few English words he knew were proper names common to Hindi and English. Thus he would point out temples to me: "Jain" as we drove past an unremarkable grey structure, "Farsi" as we glimpsed a somewhat hidden temple. Whether Sikh or Hindu or Muslim, citizens openly announced their religious beliefs with their clothing. Komal took me to a Hindu temple on my last day, possibly my strangest experience there. First she told me, "we'll have to take off our shoes, and they might get stolen." Luckily we found and paid someone to hold them for us. Then we walked up a densely populated hill, up curving stone steps that suddenly turned into old stone rooms filled with carved sculptures of different deities, ringing bells, chanting people in prayer, and flowers milk and dyes being poured on the sculptures in tribute. It was a lot to take in at one moment, and while I thought people would stare me out as a non-believer, nobody seemed to notice me. There was no exterior of the temple to speak of, for it seemed to have simply been built into the hill and the surrounding buildings. There were quiet pilgrims, loud adorers and some people in the corner who seemed to be studying texts. The scene was quite a lot to take in all at once.

Though it didn't seem like it at the time, I did and learned a lot in that short weekend. On Sunday I bought more souvenirs, including a keychain with my name in English and Devanagari, ate special Indian pizza with local spices (really delicious), natural ice cream, visited the Hindu temple and walked along the beach. It certainly was not nearly long enough to get any real grasp of what India was like and if I ever do return, I will make sure to stay at least a month. I think I could easily say that was the strangest or most interesting weekend of my life, but that didn't even begin to match the return trip...

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Why I Travel

Why do I like traveling? The short answer? I learn things. Among the things I've learned is to always start with a joke.

A man is sleeping with his neighbor's wife. Suddenly they hear the front door open - the husband is back. "Quick," the wife says, "in the closet." The husband comes into the bedroom, kisses his wife and opens his closet. "Joe! What are you doing here?" Joe shrugs, "I gotta be somewhere."

Everybody has to be somewhere. For a lot of people, that somewhere will rarely change, and even more rarely radically change. And if you like where you are, and who you're with and what you do, maybe there's no reason to move and leave all those things that constitute your life behind. But for me, I've discovered a more macro, impartial outlook on life. I've spent all my life living in the United States - why? Yes it's home, and nothing will ever change that, but it's just one country among many in this great big world. My strong connection to this awesome country shouldn't blind me from the rest of the world. So I see a map and all I look at are places I haven't been and I want to diversify. There are so many sights I've never seen, so many things I haven't done. The US is only a small part of the world, it needn't been the only part of my world.

It's like someone who grew up never eating chocolate. If you never tasted it then you don't know what you're missing. So the person without chocolate could feel perfectly content, and may be skinnier and have less cavities for his troubles. But wouldn't eating chocolate, that first bite of milky brown goodness, add some happiness to his life? Chocolate might never have been something this person ever desired, but upon tasting it he finds himself in a slightly richer and fuller life and will inevitably want more. Traveling is the same way. It might not be something you're aware of, but once you get exposed to the wonders of travel, the blinds are permanently lifted and you transcend into some higher dimension with more countries, cuisines, languages, currencies and concepts you previously didn't realize existed.

Everybody has to be somewhere. This somewhere can be home, and for most people, their current location will eventually asymptote into a (more or less) permanent home. The ideas and experiences gained from traveling often don't resonate until you are displaced from where these experiences took place. It's easy to go somewhere fabulous and come back and tell people all about it. This was precisely my modus operandi right after I got back from study abroad. "Oh Prague is absolutely gorgeous during all times of the day. The Guinness in Ireland is way better than it is here. I could've spent a day inside the Vatican." That's cool and interesting and whatnot and I'm sure all my friends whom I made listen to me were at least mildly interested. But those experiences aren't truly meaningful until they're gone from the surface of your memory and been internalized into who you are. It's the surprise feeling months or years later where something comes up and you realize, "Oh yeah. I have been to Prague." You're at a bar with friends and sip your draught and understand, "Yes the Guinness isn't quite the same here." You walk into an art gallery and recall, "Painted ceilings really are inspirational."

Because anybody can go to a place and tell you what's there. There's nothing really special about you having been to Paris. Anybody else can go and duplicate your trip, see the same Louvre, go to the top of the same Eiffel Tower, eat the same croissant. The fact that you've been to Paris isn't intrinsically special - it usually just means that you're fortunate.

What's special is what you take from the experience and what you went through in the process. Yes anyone can go to Paris but not everyone will experience it the same way. One person might understand and appreciate the Gothic architecture, another might love the theater scene, another the Nutella crepes and another the Algerian influence. One person I met booked a hostel for only two of the three nights he was there and spent a night homeless in a park. Another friend was prevented from flying in from Rome because of a strike and had to take a a last minute crowded train. Going to Paris is cool and special because it is a great city conducive to visitors coming out with a great experience, whether you're a conqueror from Corsica or a backpacker from Belmont.

The funny thing about traveling is that though it's something many people look forward to and spend a lot of money on, it's not always fun at the time. In fact a necessary component of travel is that one is taken outside of their comfort zone. Nearly all travelers will live more comfortably at home. A fun trip usually involves walking a lot, waking up early, staying in uncomfortable accommodations, having difficulty finding good food, going through transportation hassles and braving the unknown. But what really makes traveling isn't just the great sights that make you happy you waited in line or woke up early, but the contentment derived from the trip long after it is over. Simply put, it really makes me happy knowing that I've been to the places I've been. I will have to think more about this contentment to truly discover its source, but it exists and it is the main reason I travel.

So be somewhere and be there with a purpose. You'll learn more about the world and you'll learn more about yourself.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The Rest of the Summer...

So it's October now. Half the leaves are already gone, the MLB playoffs started and I've worn sweaters for 3 days in a row. Summer ended fast and the last post I have here is from Tianjin, which I only finished editing two days ago. Stuff has happened since then including a quadruple birthday bash in Beijing, a search for bottled coke in Hong Kong, a 3 day side trip to India, a really shitty flight, 10 days in Peru, eating guinea pig, getting attacked by fire ants, and moving into Capitol Hill and commuting 40 minutes to go to graduate school.
I'll just fill in the rest of Beijing and China really quickly. The week after Tianjin was my birthday week and also very near the birthdays of dear Beijing friends Vivian, Joan and Jeanie. We decided to group together to have a mega super quadruple party. In a memorable email that I composed, I dubbed it the Biggest Blowout outside of the Gulf of Mexico. We went down to this new club in Wudaokou one day called Solutions that was just empty. So we asked the owners if we could rent the place out for our birthdays and bring them a lot of business. Our end agreement was that we could just invite friends over, that they'd give us drinks and specials but wouldn't exactly reserve it or anything, and it turned out great - and terrible. Tons of people came, the music was great, everybody was happy and they had 5 kuai tequila shots. Well that wasn't so great because I hate tequila and kept having it forced down my throat. Anyways that happened and it was all fun.
The following Sunday was brutal. The following Monday we went to Blue Frog 2 for 1 burger Mondays. The Blue Frog is apparently a chain, with at the very least a location in Shanghai. The location in Beijing is set in Sanlitun village and is rather pricy, but on 2 for 1 Monday, we can afford it. Blue Frog also has great shot glasses, one of which I may have pilfered, and 99 special shots and a special reward for the individuals that consume every single one (presumably not in the same evening).

At this point I want to go over some of the small world moments from summer '10 in Beijing. Many of them have already been covered in previous posts but here's a total recap:

1. At Lush with Vivian we first meet Beatriz and basically force her to talk to us. She asks where we're from and I say "Boston." Beatriz (who goes to Simmons) then asks, "From Boston Boston or like Newton?" Indeed I am from Newton.
2. One night in Wudaokou I run into both Amy Burns, a Georgetown student whom I recognized but had never met, and Danny Mahoney, a Georgetown student whom I had met, completely randomly. They were both studying in the same program.
3. I got dinner with Amy and my friend's friend Wendy, who did not know each other. They then discovered that they were also in the same program and lived on the same floor.
4. After a frisbee dinner I walked to the subway with a guy named Larry whom I had not met. It turns out we know a lot of people in common because he went to Philips Andover (now NYU) and I know a bunch of people from there. Turns out Thao Nguyen is one of our good friends. Then I remembered that one day in the spring Thao had randomly been on Georgetown campus with one of her friends, whom I remember her telling me that her friend was visi
ting from NYU. That friend was Larry. So I randomly met someone in Beijing whom I had already previously randomly met.
5. I invited Larry to the Blue Frog night in question and turns out he knew half the people there.
6. My friend Vivian was involved with GCC and I went to a lot of their events. Later GCC would partner with the company I was working for and so I was doubly invited to their event.
7. One of my friends from summer '08 was Chirona and I found out on the BeijingUltimate blog that she was back. I found that she was living near Tsinghua and one day while on the internet in Bridge Cafe I emailed her. She then called me and asked where I was in Bridge Cafe - turns out it was 3 tables away.
8. I know Chirona through like 5 completely independent links. I first met her through my friend Frank, who was classmates with her in Brown at the time. Then we hung out on the Beijing Ultimate scene. Then I met through my roommate Austin his girlfriend Julianna, who plays ultimate at Brown with Chirona. Then it turns out my Georgetown friend Hyun was good high school friends with Chirona. Finally in Beijing 2010 I met Emily Haskel who also plays ultimate at Brown.
9. Vivian went to our usual hangout spot in Lush. She sees this girl and whispers to
me, "I think that girl was in my pro seminar freshman year." So I tell her to go and say hi and she says "She won't recognize me, that'd be really weird." "So? this is Beijing!" While we're having our little argument, this girl Dawn comes over and asks, "Excuse me, but do you go to Georgetown? I think you were in my pro seminar freshman year...." Later on I discovered that her boyfriend Rick, who went to Drexel, was best friends with this guy Bobby whom I randomly met through my roommate and his brother (who was in the same class at Drexel).
10. As ridiculous as those connections are, I think the most unbelievable small world moment occurred during July 4th. Having dinner with Amy and her program friends, we finished up and went to have our picture taken by the soccer ball in Sanlitun. I randomly found a Chinese woman and asked her "你可不可以帮忙我们照片?" She responds in Chinese and after she takes our picture, she points at us and asks, "HKIS?" We're all really confused until Amy
answers, "yeah...." Then the women says in English about how she recognized Amy and that her niece was in the same class at Hong Kong International School. Um, what?

BONUS: The flight attendant on my flight to Beijing was a Georgetown graduate.
BONUS2: Walking in the mall I passed by a guy wearing a Newton South shirt. I interrogated him and discovered that he did an exchange program there and lived within 5 minutes from my house.

So yes it may seem like a small world. In truth it is not a small world - it's a large world but a well-connected one (at least for some segments of global society). We have connections to people faraway that skips many people in between. The large scale movement of people is more predictable than intuition tells us, and this will become more and more true as network theory advances. This is a theme that I've learned which I will echo again. Many of those small world moments can be explained by their taking place in ex-pat locations, of which there are only so many in Beijing, but can still seem pretty unbelievable.

The rest of Beijing is a blur to me now, over two months gone. I tried to see everybody one last time, to go to all those restaurants and bars that I had been wanting to try, but mostly failed amidst the bustle of packing cleaning out my apartment and getting my deposit back. My landlord and his whole family came over to return the deposit and say goodbye, and I felt myself needing to give his son a gift. I saw my Red Sox hat ou
t of the corner of my eye and though I wanted to keep it, I bestowed it upon young Tony Chang and I hope that one day he finds it awesome.

It was very sad leaving Beijing early that Saturday morning. The last time I left the city, I was very ready to leave. I had created a whole list of things that I missed from home, including bagels, Dunkin' Donuts and fresh air. While I still enjoyed all those things, I thought more this time about the things I would miss about Beijing - 20 kuai dinners, late night grilled chuanr and other great street food (see pic), expatriate bonding, hot pot etc. This time I had successfully adapted - I had replaced those bagels with steamed buns, the coffee with congee. While it was sad to leave those behind, I didn't feel sad per se. My feelings were oddly mixed while I sat on that plane. The life I was leaving for would be very different, not necessarily better or worse. I've learned not to compare apples and oranges. I just knew that I was leaving behind an apple and going for the orange and that was that.