Dislocated.

Yesterday we finished our last flash quote reporter (FQR) training at the Mengxi Hotel, three other girls and I decided to walk home.  Usually we just taxi it because it is close, but far enough away that walk is long in the heat.  Since we had gotten out three hours early we were feeling a little more ambitious.  Before that we walked around a Chinese mall which consists of many cubicles with much of the same cheap, confused English t-shirts and dresses.  Each young shopkeeper laughed as if I was joking when I asked for my shoe size, si shi er (42).  High heels in China don't come in that large of a size, try 10 sizes down.  We left with nothing, but our RMB (Chinese currency) we came with.  As we began walking home, the sun was shining directly above and the sky was a clear blue.  I'm not sure if we experienced very foggy weather the first week we landed in Beijing, but China has been clearing up.  It should continue to get better as factories begin to close in anticipation of the Olympics.  Needless to say, it was hot and I didn't have water, but we walked anyway.  Soon we were wandering in places that were unfamiliar.  But we knew from an instinct feeling, that we were close to our dorms, somewhere across the railroad tracks.  It felt like another world.  There were smells so bad I know Kelsey would have gagged.  It seemed untouched by the western world.  Three malnutritioned horses pulled carts in the dirt road wide enough for 1 1/2 cars.  The houses had curtains as doors.  Those without doors, you could see inside that men and children were fast asleep.  I didn't know how they could sleep in this intense heat without air conditioning.  It was smothering.  Hints of western trends were visible if you looked, however.  A fake Orlando jersey passed by on a young, lanky boy.  A pair of nikes sat on the window still of a brick home.  As we got closer to our University, the scenery became worse.  It wasn't the rural Beijing, BOCOG (the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games) a.k.a. my boss, showed us on our Beijing tour.  They took us far outside the city to a farming village.  The people living inside showed us their homes and let us use their western toilets.  I don't think these people even had squatters.  (China's toilets where you push your pants to your knees and squat as you pee, always important to bring your own toilet paper.)  The houses here had metal sheets as their roofs and a few bricks in the corners to hold it down.  I knew it wasn't a temporary fix by the close surrounding neighbors that had the same model.  As we tried to find our way back home, we stuck out like a sore thumb.  No one said anything, but you could read their faces.  "What are you doing here?"  I have never seen America's overconsumption in such a contrasting light and it was only across the tracks from our host, Tsinghua Univeristy.  Ten minutes later we found the tunnel under the railroad and just like that we had stepped out of the time capsule.  

(It reminded me of TongLi, the poor village we visited on our trip to Shanghai.  The picture above is included as a close comparison.)