March 5-7th  -  Seattle to Beijing

Ni Hao from Beijing!

It's just after noon here on Sunday, and we are settling into our hotel room. We are at the Novotel Peace Hotel on the 10th floor in downtown Beijing.  After 20 hours in the air (SEA-LAX, LAX-Guangzhou & Guangzhou-Beijing) we're happy to be back on the ground.  We're in China!  Way closer to Ruby Jia Le than ever!!  Doesn't even seem to matter that we have that greasy, disheveled look.

Our AAO (that's our adoption agency) guide, Richard, met us in Guangzhou to help us make our connecting flight.  His assistance was much appreciated!  We were cutting it close so it was a brisk walk between terminals and back into the air quickly.  Our guide with Lotus, DouDou, met us the airport in Beijing.  She has studied English for about 10 years.  We'll have to confirm our driver's name tomorrow as neither of us quite got it. 

Our hotel is about a 20 minute walk from the Forbidden City.  For the remainder of today we'll do some wandering about and rest up.  Tomorrow we'll be visiting the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square in the evening.  A couple of things we learned today: Guangzhou (we'll be back there to complete the adoption process later) has a population of 6 million.  Beijing's population is about 13.4 million with 4 million passing through the city each day.  As many of you might already know, Beijing will be hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. 

Most people in Beijing live in apartment-type dwellings.  It's stunning to see how many there are!  Flying in you get to see how closely packed they are even on the immediate perimeter of the airport grounds.  DouDou tells us that traffic is light today as it's Sunday.  Tomorrow it should appear more like a gigantic parking lot.  En route to the hotel, I saw a man riding a motor bike transporting two largish rattan chairs on the back.  Looked to be a bit of a balancing act that I wouldn't expect to see at home.  From our hotel window we can see McDonald's, KFC, and Pizza Hut.  In another direction, we look down over the courtyards of a couple of living areas that appear similar to those that we've seen in modern day Chinese movies. 

It's a brisk day, but quite sunny and bright.  Smoggy as well.  We think it was about 17 degrees Celsius when we arrived at the airport but can't recall the conversion to Fahrenheit.  We're going to bathe before heading out.  It's going to be a little tricky to remember not to get water in our mouths, but that's the goal.

Two technical glitches so far that I (Dan) missed. Our friend Dorothy loaned us a larger compact flash card for our digital camera. I failed to test it with our card reader before we left. It doesn't want to read it. Fortunately the only photos so far were before we left home and on the airplane. I've switched cards so we can post some later tonight. The second glitch was I though I had checked all our recharging devices to make sure they were dual voltage. I must have missed the battery recharger for our digital camera. (AAs , it's an older camera) It looks like I fried it plugging it into the 220v outlet.

We'll try to post some photos later tonight.

It's now 9pm and I'm barely staying awake. We went out for a nice walk this afternoon along Wangfujing Daije. We read that this is the major shopping street in Beijing. We were warned by our guide that people would come up to us and try to get us to go look at things to buy. We soon realized that the form of this was to say they were a teacher who taught traditional style art. Wouldn't we like to see their work? The first people who tried this were good and we did go check out their "school" . We never felt unsafe we just weren't going to buy anything the first day out. They didn't try too hard to sell us things and their art was pretty good. If we don't find anything better before we leave we may go back and try to bargain for something. After we left their place we had 5 more people come up to us with the same line!

  We did have fun looking thru a few shops and big department store. I bought a battery recharger for our digital camera batteries. We bought some cokes and water and headed back to our room. We ended up ordering a pizza from room service for dinner that wasn't bad. We are looking forward to our first full day of sightseeing tomorrow!