By NICHOLAS KREBS, 7/19/2012. My intuition was correct that I would find a more immersive experience in Chengdu than in Beijing.
Ir started with the flight from Beijing to Chengdu. Instead of flying out of the large capital airport, my travel agent booked me a slightly cheaper ticket to the Nanyuan airport in the south of the city. This airport is only reluctantly a passenger terminal, catering mostly to the Chinese Air Force Almost nothing was in English when I arrived, and I also found out that my travel agent omitted my middle name on the boarding pass, meaning I needed to get issued a new ticket to get through security. Thankfully pointing to my name on the passport and the name on the ticket was sufficient to have them understand what needed to change. The best part though is that instead of issuing me a new ticket, they just wrote in my middle name in pen, which I then smudged 30 seconds later en route to handing it back to security! By heeding the first piece of advice on the Beijing hostel wall to smile kind of dopey when problems happened, I was able to charm the security agent to let me through despite the smear.
The next part was also amusing. For domestic flights, they don’t post the flight information on the gate until the plane is ready to board. And at Nanyuan, they don’t have a status board updating about flight delays So when my flight was delayed, I had to maintain a constant watch over each of the three gates to ensure I wouldn’t miss my flight, and be ready to rush to the front of the boarding line before a crowd of Chinese tourists took all the good carry-on slots on board the flight. The lack of queuing does not pose a problem to me, as I’m used to being cutthroat with the train in New York, but I was quite worried I’d accidentally board the wrong plane in my rush. It took me until my plane was rolling away from the gate before I could actually confirm with anyone that I was on the right flight.
It took me a day to get used to being in Chengdu. The city core was much smaller than Beijing’s, but the scale of development and building is far greater. Everywhere you look there is a 30 story apartment building or 10 story shopping center being built. Traveling from the airport alone I counted enough new development to house tens of thousands of residents. Jane Jacobs would find no home in many of these neighborhoods as the scale dwarfs the natural environment.
Things to write about in the future:
Day 1 Interview with Jane at Habitat
Details of each visit to the different village
Remarks on government led rebuilding/housing policy
Loneliness in a new place
Sichuan hotpot and communal dining
Interpreting between non-native speakers of English (i.e. Chinese and Spanish speakers)
Distance from expatriate life
Difficulties booking train tickets!