China!

Goodness, no matter how much I've traveled, I still always feel quite overwhelmed the first day in a new place. Despite the more ordered manner here than in Vietnam, it's still rough to be here in Beijing with everything written only in chinese, so it's like wandering around a city being mute, deaf and illiterate. So I need to use more clever tactics like having the receptionist at my hostel write down some messages for me in chinese to show people when I go to eat like "Just give me a plate to eat that doesn't have meat, I don't care what it is". If a restaurant doesn't have pictures on the menu, I'm kind of screwed, so that at least helps.

I also had a funny realization since the only travellers I've met have been quite hardcore, and I realized that some travellers can be quite snobby, in terms of what they believe is the best way to travel, whether it be eating street food, knowing the local language, sleeping on the floor, whatever. When I mentioned that I'm going to be traveling on a group-tour-thing, they just turned their noses up at me, despite my defense that it's not a typical tour, it's a group of backpackers that have a guide to help us get around, and it's a way to experience stuff I wouldn't normally get to since we stay in local guesthouses and take public transport and is by no means luxurious. But I basically felt like I lost my travel cred, which is basically all a traveller has, so it was on my mind all day today as I wandered around today, and I even felt guilty when I ended up buying an ice cream from Dairy Queen today (yep, there's Dairy Queen in Beijing), since I just pictured their disapproval.

In any case, I resolved that everyone has their own limitations and levels of comfort, and you should always work to push your comfort levels out a bit, but not everyone starts at the same spot, and people experience things in different ways. I felt quite daunted wandering around alone since I felt so lingually-isolated, and despite my mental exhaustion, I kept going despite the blinking sign in my head that was saying "Retreat, retreat!!", and then I finally got through it and felt a bit more comfortable in my surroundings. So it was good that I resisted going back and taking refuge at the hostel all day, and that was my accomplishment for the day. And I can enjoy a Dairy Queen ice cream once in a while, damn it! Anyways, that was a funny observation I realized today, I never realized I could feel like an "underachiever" at traveling!

Oh, and here's the most interesting thing I saw today--I was walking and out of the nowhere, some cops ran up and grabbed a guy next to me. His shirt was white with permanent marker writing, so I assume it was somehow subversive. They pulled him into the cop car and went away.

Another tid-bit, evidentally it seems that the Lonely Planet for China is not looked on well by the chinese government due to certain references about Taiwan, so it's possible to have it confiscated at the airport and is not sold in bookstores. China is definitely an interesting place..