Day 1: First Full Day in Beijing

The day begin with ANOTHER lovely buffet: the Beijing Bistro buffet in our hotel is amazing!!!  They had things on there like soup, Chinese pancakes, pork buns, plus lots of watermelon and smoked salmon, even.  It is all for free because we are hotel guests.  So much better than the "continental breakfasts" you get at the Hampton Inn or Best Westerns in the States.

After a short nap (Kerry and I were still a bit jet-lagged), we walked around quite a bit: almost four miles up and down the streets of Beijing.  We spent a lot of the time dodging mopeds, which DO NOT CARE where they are going.  There is no such thing as "waiting for pedestrians" on the streets of Beijing.  We also noted weird things like cars parking or driving on the sidewalk, or even in the middle of the road.  Still, folks seem to take all this in stride!

We felt very safe walking around.  A lot of English signage, too.  We even popped in to a KFC, just for drinks. The cashier recognized that our Chinese was at the toddler level and immediately handed us an English menu, which enabled us to just point at what we wanted.  We also noticed a manager and customer screaming at each other in Chinese and were very curious as to what that was all about! We also stopped in at a 7-Eleven--we purchased a bottle of what we thought was water, but it turned out to be some sort of Gatorade-ish product.

Another social faux pas: when we got back to the hotel, we were drinking sodas in the lounge.  We ordered some additional drinks after giving them our room number.  We assumed that they'd just had these to our bill, so after we drank the drinks, we just took off.  The server and manager ran after us, following us into the elevator, asking us to pay up.   Which we did.  Oops!!

We got dressed up for the dinner with the Fulbrighters: I wore my green shirt and yellow tie.  The dinner was served dim sum style, and, even though it was advertised as a "Peking duck" dinner, it had EVERYTHING: beef, shrimp, mixed greens, lotus root, rice (served near the end!), and Asian pairs for dessert.  There were literally about 20 different dishes on the table.  The major negative thing is that I got food all over myself, and even succeeded to dip my tie in the duck sauce. All my clothes got sent to the laundry.

We came up and stuggled to get ViperVPN to work, and I finally gave up.  One of the frustrations of living here so far, without question, is sporadic Internet service.  I'm amazed that I'm able to type this blog entry: thank you ExpressVPN!!