After 24 hours on the ground in Beijing, it’s finally really settling in that I’m in a whole other country. For the first few hours, I was so tired I might have just taken an 11 hour plane ride to Richmond for all I knew.
But here we are: me, Kat, and our friends Oli and Tina. We’re staying at the hotel where Tina’s conference was. (The conference was the original seed of the idea for the trip.) The hotel is around NW 3rd ring road, near Peking and Tsinghua Universities, for those who care.
Today, we met a friend of a friend who grew up in this part of the city. He showed us around the two Universities. It really seems like they have a Harvard/MIT thing going on: Peking is the top-ranked school, but Tsinghua is right next door, a close second, and has more of an engineering/applied focus.
Kat and I always seem to swing by local Universities when we’re on vacation. Having spent just about exactly half of my life around Universities, there’s a comforting sameness about them. What differences exist are always glaring.
In the name of not packing too much into this trip, that was our day. We’ll probably do something after dinner: plans still unclear.