HOME! HOME! HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS AND BEYOND...

am finally home in vancouver! i've finished writing up our china odyssey... here goes...



Day 1
We started in Beijing where the weather was sunny, crisp and cold. When we arrived at the airport, Dennis and I realized that we had no means of communication with Rodrigo and that he didn’t know our flight number, our cell phone numbers or the hotel information. That should be an indication of the planning that went into the trip. Anyways, we met up and headed into town. The drive from the airport was notable because we got our first view of the Beijing smog and because the forests we were driving though looked a lot like Ontario does – which makes sense, I guess, considering the latitude. And the airport had three terracotta warriors from Xi’an in it so I don’t need to go there now! See them! Check! Three is just as impressive as 10,000, I’m sure.
The hotel was good. I had my own giant room with a private bathroom on the first night, which was a nice change from PGH1. It was also right next door to Sogo (department store) so Starbucks was nearby. The staff at the hotel were great but it was kind of sad to have so many characters vying for the right to hire us a taxi or book our flights to Chengdu. One evening, four different hotel employees came to the door looking for Dennis to see if they could help us. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. There were also nearly always about nine people at the reception desk, ready to help out. I ended up staying in three different rooms over my four-night stay. My rooms were great, but Dennis and Rodrigo had construction going on next door and suffered a bit.
On our first night, we hopped on the subway to Wangfujing. The Beijing subway is really something… in Shanghai, the cars were humid and kind of smelly but in Beijing, the whole system – stations, trains, etc… is archaic. Tickets must be purchased from the booth and then handed to another lady to be ripped so that you can enter. The poor ladies looked so cold and bored but I guess it’s an effective way to create jobs for the 1.3 billion people (though I hear it’s more like 1.6) Wangfujing is a big avenue with loads of stores and people sauntering about. We ended up at Peking duck restaurant and between the three of us, took down the restaurant’s 182,051th bird (or something like that). They even gave us a card to commemorate the occasion.