soid | Weekend in Beijing, July 8-9

(Written a week later)

My New York home-based VPN stopped working when I was hanging around Tiananmen Square on Friday. I first thought that was flaky cellular reception – the Internet never works fast for me here for some reason, even Baidu takes a second to open; perhaps, my phone is bound to American DNS or whatnot. Perhaps, they block the VPN on Tiananmen Square? Technically, it should be doable, if all strange traffic goes to one IP address – it must be clear what is happening. Then, the VPN worked for me again in the evening, and then completely disappeared. So, Chinese Internet without VPN is like no Internet: even Telegram didn't work – how come Russia couldn't block it, but China could? I couldn't even find some party facts in English – when the Long March took place, etc – Baidu didn't find anything in English. Russian Yandex wanted my Chinese phone number to let me use its search. Everything wanted my phone number, in fact: cafe WiFi's, WeChat payments, subway tickets, DuoLingo, etc. So, it was a digital detox weekend until I got a local SIM card on Monday, and a friend helped figuring out another VPN solution; it's called ClashX – there are way too many VPNs solutions – it uses multiple servers, measures latencies, and more smart in general, it seems.

By the way, besides asking my local phone number, DuoLingo disables most of social features here: no friends, no avatars, only the leaderboard and people's names. For learning Chinese characters I bought another notebook here for 3 yuan for practicing writing – it feels so essential to try writing them for seeing the differences, and DuoLingo not teaching it at all. Otherwise, my next problem here with my Chinese is my face – people just don't expect hearing Chinese from me.

Beijing architecture: mixture of Chinese, Soviet, and American Minecraft boxes

For the weekend we stayed in Beijing's kind of outskirts called Fengtai district – that is pretty much where Jia Zhangke's "The World" (2004) takes place. Basically, the kind of places where Beijing people live – from 40 minutes to over an hour commute to financial district. We drove from a shopping mall (a totally North American kind), and I was asked what I thought of Beijing way of living, and I said it was very similar to New York, except the buildings are higher; people less familiar with foreigners think here that foreigners have some different exotic life style: that we can't eat without forks, very clean, etc. Nope, people are people, and Chinese are extra attentive and hospitable to foreigners, so much that they could be less so. But; that is not totally true, of course; there is nothing in the world like New York City subway (I'm being sarcastic here).

Subway riders: everyone on their phone. I have mostly seen people either playing games or watching videos.

We went to a police station to register me as a foreigners staying with residents; the instruction was given to me at the border. The local police chief talked to us a little bit, wished me safe and happy staying in China – his photo was posted everywhere in the neighborhood, so I felt like talking to some kind of local celebrity. The city is quite clean from the ads and advertisement billboards, only the photos of police chief and some other district employees.

What else? Some kids don't hide their curiosity to see me, some open their mouth looking at me, some say "hello laowai!" and then I say "hello". I kind of like this kid's open unrestrained curiosity and wonder if some adults feel this way.

Weekend in Beijing, July 8-9

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