In China...

I just woke up after a few hours of sleep. The flight from Malaysia was about 8 hours and it took me about 2.5 hours to get from Tianjin - Binhai International Airport to Beijing South Railway station.

My trip started with a bus from the airport to the railway station. It wasn't difficult to locate the bus ticket counter and hence, get on a clean-air conditioned coach. I took one of the bullet train to reach my destination, Beijing South Railway station. The travelling was of only 30min. Really fast as well.

I had the opportunity of travelling by the MRT in Singapore. Beijing's subway system is similar and almost equally match the Singaporean's MRT. From where I got off, I walked to my hostel. Along the roads, you can see the traditional people still on bicycle while there's also a lot of motor vehicles on the roads. One has to be extremely careful as drivers (as in any other big cities) are always in a rush.
Moreover, on each side of a street, there are hawkers and small (anything you want) retailers. That's the less clean part & actually an eye-sore of the city of Beijing.
Despite the challenge to ask for my way, I manage to locate the hostel which is luckily close to the subway station.

A first afternoon which ended quite well.

A few things I to remember:

1. I bought a sim card at the airport in Tianjin and it's already out of service. That's a pure "Made in China" product. Faulty one :(
( I have tested my phone with another local sim card & it works. It's definitely the newly bought sim card which is faulty!)

2. In one of the shop, I was mistaken for a Chinese Singaporean...Do they think because I use a mixture of Mandarin & English that I'm Singaporean??? (which appears most likely as a barely understandable language to most of them).


3. Last but not least, this happened outside of a restaurant. I was with 1 AIESEC member from AIESEC RUC and his non-AIESEC friend. We had already ordered food and received everything, including chopsticks. But, just for fun, I asked my friend to ask for a spoon & a fork. He did so...the waiter replied they didn't have such thing here! Is it a catastrophic thing? Not at all. It was indeed funny when it was asked!