It's Just Like Home Around Here

Every hallway in my dorm here has several framed 8 x 10 prints of paintings of mountains, countryside, and cottages that have to be scenes from the US, Canada, or Europe. At first, one of the students in my group said that the dorm put these paintings up to make us feel more at home. As I've explored the dorm, I've seen them on every floor, not just the 9th and 10th floor where we're living.

Here's my favorite.


So I thought maybe it was some phenomenon particular to the whole dorm (we're in a special international center dorm at the CUC.) Then I went to a cafe for a bite to eat while touring the Temple of Heaven, probably the third most iconic place in Beijing, behind the Forbidden City and Tian'anmen Square. This cafe had prints just like in the dorm, but more focused on cottage life. It seemed so out of place at a site of such national and city pride.

Cafe photo:


The real jaw dropper, though, came when my roommate and I unsuccessfully tried to get train tickets to and from Xi'an, home of the terra cotta warriors. We went all the way to the Beijing West Railway Station to get tickets in person, the only way to buy tickets if you can't use a Chinese website and without paying a huge service fee for an online agent to do it for you.

At the end of the train station, on a huge wall over a waiting area, was a massive picture of Mount Moran in the Tetons in Wyoming. The thing had to have been 8-10 feet tall and 20-30 feet long. It was so out of place that I started doubting myself and thinking that it must have been some other mountainous area, definitely not in China, though. I had to stop and take several photos to compare to pictures of Mount Moran later on the internet, but it was a pretty bad time to stop because Trisha and I were being stared at more than usual. A lot of country folk were in the train station, so we must have been more of a novelty to them than to most local Beijing residents. I was so concentrated on the mural that I could ignore the two men circling us to stare. They were harmless, but Trisha got to see one pull out a pocket mirror and check his face and hair before coming closer to see us!

Train station photo mural of Mount Moran in the Tetons: