China Day One

On the first day of our trip to China we got up bright and early at about 1230AM. Christine stayed up the entire night. Probably due to excitement. I got about three or four hours of sleep. We got ready and headed down to the airport. Our flight left at 420AM so we got to the airport around 2AM. We then got on our flight to Seoul Korea. The flight was about four hours and we were lucky enough to get an exit row seat with enough room for us to sleep a little.

Well one of us anyway.

We then had a two or so hour layover in Seoul, which was just enough time to get through the transfer process to our next gate. This is what the Seoul Airport looks like.

The flight from Seoul to Beijing was about two hours.

This is one of the many new food items we were treated to on the plane. I don't know what made the Yak Ill but I don't really want to eat it. Actually I did and it was like rice and nuts held together with maple syrup.

This is the entry card for Beijing. If you look at about the middle right card it says Reason for Coming to China, one of your options is to “Settle Down”.

This is the China Customs form. If you click on the picture to make it bigger you can see where it says its illegal to bring poison of any kind into China, as if you needed a reminder.

We were met at the airport by our tour guide, who had a large sign with both of our names on it. It felt a little star like to have someone actually waiting there to greet us. We got into our car, which was a Mercedes Benz van, and headed to the hotel. Our tour group turned out to be just me and Christine, so we had much more freedom with our schedule and how long we stayed at the different sites. It was extremely nice to only be accountable for the two of us as we saw several tour groups of around 30 people, everyone looking to make sure they got all the other people before moving on, guides using megaphones to talk about the sites etc. We got the same in Xi'An as well.

This is our hotel room. It was actually pretty nice. The place also rents units out as condos or apartments.

This is one of the two worst beds in all of the world. The 2nd one was at our hotel in Xi'An. Apparently its an Asian thing to have beds made of concrete with a sheet covering them. Well actually if the bed was made of concrete it would be cold, so thats not an entirely accurate representation of the bed. But the room did have two air conditioners so we got it nice and cool.
They gave us a little downtime so Christine took another little nap while I explored the hotel.

We then got picked up and went to a pearl factory where they showed us how they get pearls from Oysters, how many pearls are in an oyster (the one we opened had at least 15) and the different jewelry they make from the pearls there. Since it was our six month anniversary Christine got a necklace.

We then went to the Dumpling Palace, where we had the first of what turned out to be a thousand dumplings on this trip. The dumplings were very good, we had onion and beef and mushroom and pork I believe.

We then went to an Acrobat show across the street. There are three famous shows in Beijing that most tourists go see. We ended seeing two of them, more on that later though.

This show was an acrobat show, and had people spinning from ropes hanging on the ceiling, jumping through hoops, human pyramids and other acrobatics.

After the show we were really glad we had fit dinner in before the show as it was about 10pm and we were ready to sleep. Back to the hotel to and the hardest bed in the world.

Thus ends day one in China.