Live From Beijing!

Everyone!

It's been quite the trip! Everything went very smoothly with our travel-- no bad weather- no delays. Just a really long flight from Chicago to Beijing-- 13 1/2 hours. We flew over Siberia and was able to see some of the landscape-- pretty cool.

Our agency guide was waiting for us in Beijing and everthing went very smoothly and amazingly quickly getting through the Visa checks and customs. The pictures posted are random pictures I took on the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. One each of Wim and I on the bus too excited about being in Beijing to feel how tired we truly are. We are pretty wiped! I didn't sleep Tuesday-night and only slept a couple hours today on the plane. Wim slept Tueday-night, but not enough.

We are all checked into our hotel, the Poly Plaza, in Beijing. Our guide took us and the other families who checked in today to a grocery store that is within walking distance to buy some bottled water etc., as it is much cheaper at the grocery store than in our hotel.After we unpacked from the grocery excursion, Wim and I decided to break off on our own and get dinner.

We ducked into a little restraunt down a couple blocks down from our hotel. It was pretty busy so we figured the food must be good-- and it was much better than good. Ordering the food was interesting because the folks there didn't speak English and our Mandarin isn't great-- but we managed to order some pretty yummy food.Although, we are not entirely sure what we ate.

One dish was made with some kind of small chicken pieces-- almost like left over chicken peices that we cut from larger pieces (bones and all). It wa spicy --- but not too much and very tasty. The second dish was fried very small shrimp (shells and eyes and all) with cilantro and celery (we think). This was also very good.

We forgot to take the camera with us when we went out this evening-- we also forgot our Mandarin dictionary etc. Like I said, dinner was an interesting experience.

Ok, folks, that's it for tonight. It is 8:00 pm Beijing time which is 7:00 am EST and I've basically been up since 5:00 am Tuesday, March 18th. It is time for a shower and then our beddy-bye-basket!

We'll post more tomorrow and I'll remember the camera for the Hutong Tour.