Wait, there's life!

It's four and a bit years since I released the last blog post on this page. I would've had more than enough opportunities to continue, but I felt like this documentation of nine months of travelling at age 18 was a very nice, coherent piece that I shouldn't awake from its slumber. I could've blogged about my new life in Berlin or at least about my five months in Taiwan, but I felt that it couldn't quite match this, since I neither had the time, nor the motivation to put as much effort into it. Well, four amazing years passed and after heavy-heartedly saying goodbye (for now) to the city I call home, a new stage of my life starts - in Beijing. I'll be here for at least one year, mostly in order to finally bring the fascinating chaos that the Chinese language to a Western learner is to a decent level. After a few people asked me explicitely whether I was going to blog again and a lot more asked me to always keep them updated about my doings, I decided to give this page another shot, though certainly not with the same obsession and love for details as I used to. Oh, and it's English now. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but since a decent portion of my friends these days can't speak German, I thought it was fair to use a more universal language. If this goes as I hope it will, I'll post some things every week or so, not so much about my travel experiences (matter of fact, I spend most of my time in the very same dormitory room), but about the life here. 

Arguably being the second most powerful and important country in the world, people - that includes me - know astonishingly little about China, its history and culture. When I set off for my stay here, I received many well-meant comments, lots of which unveiled the same few stereotypes that are widely held among Germans: Chinese copy technology, Chinese eat dogs and cats and China is brute dictatorship. Admittedly, none of these are entirely wrong, but they probably shouldn't be the first things coming to one's mind when thinking of China. Instead, think of a country on its way to a smartphone society, where anything you can and can't imagine can be done with some app. Think of a surveillance state so sophisticated you can't escape it. Or, if you will, think of a stratified society between the endless skylines of Beijing and Shanghai and brick and mortar villages in the Gansu province that have just been connected to the electricity network. 

Bigger picture aside, I arrived here a few days ago on the 6th of September. Not for the first time, so I knew what to expect. The airport railway ride gives you a first sensation that Western standards of city size do not really apply here. Beijing is traversed by so called ringroads, six of which currently exist. While my university is located close to the 3rd ringroad in the west, everything up to the 4th can be considered dense urban area. The loop has a diameter of 16km. If one adds the suburban areas up to the 6th ringroad, the diameter easily becomes 40km and that's not really where Beijing ends, the buildings are just becoming more dispersed. The official account states 24 000 000 inhabitants for the metro area and an ambitious government plans to meld the cities of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province to a megalopolis with around 130 000 000 inhabitants.

Pratically this means that getting anywhere outside your neighborhood can be a pain in the ass, even with abundant and cheap taxis. Though the infrastructure is neat, the sheer amount of people and the distances to be covered make inner-city trips exhausting.

Speaking of neatness, central Beijing is about as poor and shabby as Tokyo or Singapore, which is to say it's not. Its rents are well above Germany's champions Munich and Berlin, making it the city with the worst income to rent ratio in the world. The cityscape is vast, dotted with skyscrapers, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of highrise apartment blocks and all sorts of concrete built structures. Avenues with 8+ lanes slash their way through these, giving a clear indication that whoever walks around here is probably just to poor to be motorized. This changes once one goes for the smaller side streets. These are often greener and full of live. Despite boasting lots of it, Beijing is not a concrete city and does have parks, trees and recreational areas. This is however disturbed by the fact that air pollution can still be a major problem.

Personally, I was very lucky. My dormitory is on the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) campus. Motorized traffic is strictly limited here and nearly everything I need is within hand's reach (and for everything else there are the Chinese order apps, but that's a different chapter). Add to that the fact that with a bit of extra money you can afford the luxury of privacy (read: a non-shared room, which is very uncommon at universities in Asia), and life here can be quite comfortable once you figured out how to arrange your basic necessities such as bank account, getting around and using the Chinese internet.