My China in Numbers

As my summer program is over, and my semester at Beijing University is about to start, I thought it was time to sum some things up.

0: number of times I felt unsafe in Beijing. That’s a record among all my travels: only Hong Kong felt safer to me;

0: number of time I heard ‘economic crisis’ outside the classroom; about 1,000,000 — number of times I heard it in the U.S. or Russia every day;

0.25: cost of one lamb kebab, in USD;

0.6-0.7: cost of a large cup of bubble tea, in USD;

0.7: average cost of a fake DVD, in USD;

1: emergency root canal = 1 cancelled trip to Inner Mongolia;

1: big culture shock so far (see this post);

1.1: average cost of a very filling dinner for one, in USD (that’s just me, of course, and I don’t eat much meat, which tends to be more expensive, but it’s still very illustrative;

2: years I have left at Yale (of which one semester will be spent in Beijing);

3: number of different H&M’s I have gone to one fine day in Beijing (purely for comparison purposes, of course)

4: months I have left in China (which makes me very happy);

6: average number of students in one room at a college dorm in China (1 or 2 at Yale; 2 at Yale-PKU Joint Undegraduate Program, thankfully);

7-14: allowance, per day of rehearsal, that the government pays to the students preparing for the big parade to be held on the National Day (Oct. 1), in USD — the first big rehearsal was held already: check this story.

10: (very happy) weeks I’ve spent in Beijing so far;

35cm (1.1 foot): maximum allowed height for dogs in Beijing (dogs who happen to outgrow it are often put to sleep or simply abandoned);

60: number of years China will be turning on Oct. 1; 1,000,000: number of crazy security measures the government in undertaking;

100: approximate number of cups of bubble tea I consumed in China so far;

570: monthly salary of a teacher at my summer program, in USD (and that’s apparently pretty good by local standards);

800: the approximate number of new Chinese words I learned this summer;

200,000: participants in aforementioned National Day parade;

Over 17 million: Beijing’s population (for comparison, NYC’s population is under 9 million; Moscow’s is estimated to be 12 million)

Infinite: reasons to come to China