Not so Smooth Arrival to Beijing

Four days before arriving in Beijing we found out that something called Golden Week was going to start the day after our designated arrival. Google told us that Golden Week is a seven-day-long national holiday that starts with Chinese National Day on October 1st and ends on the 7th. 

This year the Chinese spend reportedly around 57 billion US dollars during Golden Week (more than the Finnish government spends in one year). So if you are interested in a new business opportunity, attracting even a fraction of Chinese tourists and their dollars would not be a bad idea. Chinese people are getting richer and richer and can afford to travel even farther. Plus, Finland has a good reputation in China. Learn Chinese, work in Chinese tourism in Finland, attract the people, set up some activities, give them Chinese food (this is important!) - and voilà! (I am not responsible for any consequences that may result from mass tourism.) 

Travelling in Beijing, Golden Week means both challenges and also great opportunities. Chinese National Day is an enormous celebration that people from all over the world travel to China to witness. There are festivities, all sorts of events and huge shopping discounts available for your enjoyment. The weather during that time is usually especially nice, which makes is an ideal week for a holiday. The locals have free time to show Beijing to tourists.

However, Golden Week also creates some challenges. All hotels are booked. Transportation tickets are difficult to get and they are expensive. Beijing can be quite crowded. And holiday time means many Chinese people living in Beijing are away travelling somewhere which makes it harder to get a Couch.

As we were looking for a Couchsurfing place in Beijing, we noticed that most hosts prefer to accommodate one Surfer only and some host only women. This limited our options, as there are two of us. Thankfully there are a lot of Beijing hosts to choose from. I prefer to stay with the locals than in a hotel or hostel, because staying with locals provides you with a travelling experience that you cannot get in a hotel. Locals let you see their home and their lifestyle. They provide you with a unique chance to see how the life really is in their country. Compared to that hotels and hostels offer just a bleak surface glimpse and leave you with almost no palpable impression of the country you just visited. Finally, we found a host and boarded our train to Beijing.

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If you are interested in taking a Trans Siberian (Manchurian) Railway to Beijing, be aware that crossing the border between Russia and China is quite boring. It takes a lot of time as the officials check every compartment and passport and ask everybody a ton of questions. While this is happening the toilets are closed so it is unwise to drink a lot of water right before the border. How long does it take? It depends on how many passengers there are and how many of them have dual citizenship. One person with dual citizenship makes crossing the border approximately 68% more tedious.

I have dual citizenship. No less than five people (up to very high ranks I think) were crowding in front of our compartment looking at my passports. I asked whether I was the first person with dual citizenship to cross the border. They laughed, ”of course not!” but it still took far too long. They had some sort of hand held scanning device with them and as they scanned a passport they input some information there about the passenger. My situation gave them more to work with. They had to scan two passports under the same name and they were looking for a person who knew how to do it.

Finally we were done with the Russian side of the border. As the Chinese officers came, I only gave them one of my passports in attempt to make the process quicker. My plan worked and my passport was checked just as slowly (but not slower) than everybody else's. Later our provodnitsa (the train conductress) said that the Russian officials had bullied even her about my dual citizenship. Our provodnitsa (the classic provodnitsa that she is) lied that she had no idea about my dual citizenship. 

”Why did you give them your Russian passport?” she asked. ”I had you listed as Finnish.” 

”Because they had to put a stamp there as a sign that I have left Russia,” I explained. ”When I entered, they put a stamp there and now they wanted to look at that stamp and put another one next to it.” 

”Then why did you tell me to list you as Finnish?” 

”Because my Chinese visa is in my Finnish passport and you asked me to pick a nationality.” 

What can I do if I have dual citizenship? Dual citizenship is dual citizenship. It's 50-50. I cannot just ”pick one” as I fancy. It doesn't work like that.

I have found that most provodnitsas are quite challenging people. First of all, they don't speak anything but Russian. Second of all, they are quite strict. Third of all, they will trick you into giving them more money than you actually owe just to get something for themselves. And finally, if you happen to be the only English speaking passenger in the carriage, they will use you as their free translator no matter if you are awake or asleep. The rules that apply to you don't apply to them, of course. They will yell at passengers for illegal smoking and then they will go have a smoke themselves. Completely normal. Most provodnitsas are women, from young to middle aged. Despite the fact that they work with tourists, they know maximum two words of English. Why? Because she da boss. She doesn't have to know any English. They are drunk with power. That's the charm of provodnitsas.

(By no means am I saying that all provodnitsas are like that! Maybe the ones we came across ruin the reputation for all of them, I don't know. It's just the general impression that we got. Nor do I mean to say that they're bad people. I bet they just have a very hard job.)

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When we arrived to Beijing, my stomach decided it was no longer going to be constipated. In other words, I got diarrhea. The arrival morning didn't go so smoothly in other ways either. We didn't have a map, so we couldn't find where to buy a sim card. Unlike in many other countries, in China you cannot use wi-fi unless you have a Chinese sim card. So we were completely without map and without the Internet. We also didn't have any cash when we got off the train. The first bankomat we tried didn't speak English and spewed out our card. Thankfully we found an English-speaking one after a bit of looking. Then we bought some over-priced toilet paper, because Chinese public toilets don't have any.

I don't know why I didn't consider it before, but in China, everything is in Chinese. I cannot read Chinese. I cannot speak Chinese. With speaking it's better, because some Beijing residents speak English, but that doesn't make you understand the writing. I know what you might be thinking if it's the same thing that I was thinking – I'll figure it out somehow. How hard can it be? I can tell a supermarket apart from a bank. I'm not stupid. Well... ok. Go ahead. (Actually it's quite easy to tell where the banks are as they are all marked in English, but you get my point.) 

Like I already mentioned, you cannot use Chinese wi-fi without a Chinese sim card. So find out beforehand where the closest China Unicom, China Telecom or China Mobile (biggest operators in China) office is and mark it on your paper map. Head there as soon as you arrive if you want to have Internet.  

Knowing and having a local Chinese and English speaking person to show you around is priceless.