Well I made it. For the record, catching your flight at 3:30 in the morning is brutal. Last night (this morning?) I counted 27 flights that were supposed to leave within 50 minutes of one another at Dubai. The place was an absolute madhouse, it was like being at a ball game. Long lines for the bathroom, you got jostled everywhere, and there was an amazing amount of noise. Why they decide to do this at 2:30 in the morning is beyond me…
I got no sleep on the flight, but I was rewarded with a view of the Himalayas in the morning. It was strange, I knew that they were huge mountains, they certainly looked like hige mountuans what with the snow and all. My scale was all screwed up though, being up so high played some real tricks with my eye. In any event, they were amazing.
We landed in Beijing and it struck me as a lot like Sana’a, except very green and clean. There is a lot of razor wire, I saw a crew razor wiring an empty lot… Once we landed, the plane kept going and going along endless tarmac. The only reason I knew we had’t gone to Hong Kong was that we didn’t go over any water. We did stop eventually and had to take a bus back to the terminal, an odd arrangement to be sure.
So far Beijing looks like a really nice place. Went to dinner in a rather nice place and had my first Chinese food in China. Rick ordered the Peking duck, can’t miss with that when you’re in Peking. I ordered deep fried pork ribs. Turns out that they were, well, deep fried pork ribs. They were too slippery with grease to use the chop sticks, so I went back to the western utensils. Mom originally ordered a fish dish. In the menu it looked like it would cost around 20 yuan for 50 grams of the fish. We figured that it was some sort of nouvelle cuisine. Well, when the waitress came back and let us know that the fish would be somewhere north of 800 yuan (7.6 yuan to the US dollar), we knew we had misjudged something, Turns out the price was the price per 50 grams. So they weighed the fish to see how much it would actually cost. That was a close call with a really expensive dinner. Everyone enjoyed their meal (although I’m glad I tried the fried pork ribs, I don’t think I’ll be ordering them again), and we wandered around a little. I am going to buy some clothes while I’m here, what better place for inexpensive clothing? Wandered into a mall and I thought I was in Tyson’s II. Dunhill, Givenchey, Hugo Boss, etc. were the kind of stores there. A little bit beyond my range. I’ll keep looking. Turns out we’re going to a Peking opera and all I have to wear are t-shirts and jeans. I hope I can find something spiffier without spending too much.
Well, I’m beat. We’re going to wander around aimlessly tomorrow, hope to take a bunch of pictures and have them up tomorrow night. Now I’m going to get my first decent sleep I’ve had in two days.