On the 16th of August the journey started. A date that had been prevalent in my mind for a long time, as this would be the day when a new chapter of my life started. 12:30 my mum drove me to the train station to Stuttgart. At around 16 o’clock I arrived at the airport in Frankfurt, roughly 4 hours before my flight left. Already waiting for me there was Iven. At 19:32 our plane left with a slight delay from Frankfurt towards Beijing.
This was our breakfast, which was quite good apart from the looks. The main dish was porridge with meat and peas.
After ~10 hours we arrived in Beijing being quite tired as in Germany the time was 5am and we got barely any good sleep on the plane. Nevertheless, the journey had to continue towards our connecting flight which was in another airport in Beijing. In order to get there we used a Didi taxi which is way more affordable than in Western countries. For a 1 hour ride to the other airport we paid ~10 euros per person. Between our flights we had 7 hours to transfer between airports, check in, and so on. Yet we arrived at the other airport having 5 hours left until our flight would start. Thus, we went out to eat our first Chinese meal!
After the meal we strolled around for a few hours, exploring the airport, which was not that interesting. One hour before our flight was planned to start the boarding, we still couldn’t see a counter which we go to. Turns out the counters don’t get explicitly mentioned for some flights, rather it’ll show an area at the airport where it’s obvious where to go. Yet, we somehow didn’t understand. Thus, we were in a massive rush to still catch our flight. After showing our ticket to some person that seemed like he was part of the staff at the airport, he calmly pointed us to a massive line, which surely would have taken half an hour to check our luggage in. Baffled, we showed our ticket to another member of staff, who, upon seeing our departure time, rushed us to a special counter that took our luggage immediately. As the security check-in was also crowded we arrived at our gate half an hour before boarding.
Understandably, we were stressed, which, however, turned out to be beneficial as stress makes one awake! This enabled us to stay awake for our whole flight to Nanjing. During this flight Iven got to know 2 Chinese guys, who were seated in front of him watching some western animated series and he was peeking through the seat to see it. They saw him peeking and initiated a conversation, resulting in us exchanging contacts with Oscar and John. At the airport we continued to talk and they seemed to realize how lost we were within this big airport in the outskirts of the even bigger city. Thus, they offered to take a taxi with us so we could get into the city center, which we gladly agreed to. After having arrived at their hotel, Oscar and John helped us to get a Didi to our hotel.
On this ride our tiredness finally started to kick in, being so close to our destination. At roughly 11pm we arrived at our hotel and immediately went to sleep. We woke up at around 10am, feeling perfectly rested. Somehow, we’d magically survived jet lag without much of a fight!
It’s hard to imagine that I’ll be staying a whole year here, to be honest. It still feels more like a holiday, one that’ll probably be over within a week. I’m curious to see how I’ll react when the realization starts to kick in. We’ll see.
The next few days, Iven and I will explore the area around our hotel, plus a few select spots within the city. We haven’t planned any large trips as we wanted to arrive early to first settle down before uni starts.
Now a little meta update as my arrival is 2 weeks in the past. Right now I’m sitting in the library on the university campus finishing up this first “real post”, which took longer than I expected. This is partly because I’m working on several posts at once. Starting a new draft is easy, yet finishing one isn’t. Additionally, a lot has been happening over the last 2 weeks. I still haven’t really settled down. However, I can find some spare time in which I can continue writing this blog.