Our friends Eric and Allison invited us to dinner at a Morrocan restaunt closer to the center of Beijing. I remember how this would work in New York. They’d text me the address, or the name, and I could look it up. If I was stuck, I could hopstop it, which would show me exactly how to get there, down to the blocks I’d have to walk after the subway. This is a luxury that I don’t have in Beijing.
Eric did send me the link for the restaurant. I was able to find the address, but when I tried to put it in google maps, the map is in Chinese (even under googlechrome, which translates most webpages.) It also couldn’t find the exact restaurant at first. I think happens because the pinyin (alphabetic spelling for the Chinese characters) is very specific, and because Beijing is gigantic, or because the internet likes to see me frustrated. After 10 minutes of playing around with the street name, or the area, I was able to find the exact restaurant with one little flag. Success!
Nope, just kidding. I had no idea how to get myself to that area. Everything is in Chinese, so I could only guess at what might have been a subway stop near there, and which one that would be. After another insanely long time I was able to match the Chinese characters and find out which two subway stops it was between, but the street names were all also in Chinese, and it was at least 10 blocks away from the closest stop. (Beijing blocks, by the way, are about 2 U.E.S. avenues long, so you really don’t want to take a wrong turn.)
Eventually, we decided to take a taxi. Easy! (In New York, that is.) In China, that involves trying to communicate with the driver, who does not speak any English, and does not know where everything is, because Beijing is such a large city. Kelly was able to look at the Google map and make a mark on the map that we have of the location, and we showed it to the driver. He took us, and then dropped us of somewhere near where we were supposed to me. It took us 10 minutes, under the light from a store’s sign, to figure out which direction was north, and to make a guess about which way we should walk.
Needless to say, when we finally saw the sign, it was a good moment. We were lucky that this is a Moroccan restaurant, so the sign was in English. If we were looking for a Chinese place, we’d have to meticulously match the characters!
wow!! amazing! you're doing great and learning so much!
ReplyDelete