China - part one

We fully intended to update this blog regularly during our adventure in China; however, we did not anticipate that the country of China would have Blogger blocked (in addition to Facebook and Gmail) - poor planning on our part. That being said, we did blog during our trip, and we'll start to share those entries now (while sitting in the LA airport, waiting on our last flight that departs at 1:40 AM).
Today, I'll share our entry from the first day. I say "our" because Mr. Maestro is about to make his blogging debut! Hold on to your hats!


May 31, 2011
After more than 24 hours of travel, we have arrived safe and sound in Beijing! The first thing we saw upon arrival was the Beijing Capitol Airport's brand new international terminal - aptly named "Terminal 3" (as there were two previous terminals). It was bright, airy, clean and shiny new. Our tour guide, Jane, informed us that it was finished just prior to the Olympics in 2008. I snapped a quick shot before going through customs (which, i might add was slightly against the rules...) so you could get a glimpse of our first sights upon arrival. It was a stark contrast to the terminal I remember arriving in on our last Chinese adventure in 2004.



{these elderly people were not a part of the youth symphony}

Ok, on to a more exciting topic- FOOD!
After making our way through customs, we met up with our tour guides and loaded two busses to take us to breakfast and then to check in at our hotel. We stopped at this restaurant for a traditional Chinese dim sum breakfast. Apparently this establishment is famous as the first 24 hour restaurant in Beijing.



{are you jealous of my t-shirt? The best thing about traveling in a large group, besides being totally conspicuous in every other way, is wearing matching shirts}

We had seven courses for breakfast, including dumplings, steamed vegetables, pot stickers, "meat pancake" and a porridge that appeared to have chunks of mushrooms in it- which later turned out to be aged egg..... I regret to inform you that we were so hungry at this point, we completely forgot to document this part of the day!

We returned to our busses and made our way to the Mercure (Mercury) Hotel in Downtown Beijing. It is lovely! Here are some photos of our home for the next three days.






I will now it over to Mr. Maestro to wrap up our first day in China...

Hello, world! Mr. Maestro here. To wrap up our first day should be a simple enough task. We were so beat after our 24+ hours of traveling, huge breakfast, and check-in process that we didn't do much more on Tuesday. In a feeble attempt to stave off jet-lag we decided to take a walk. Highlights included people getting a hair-cut and shave on the side of the street under the bridge, an odd Bavarian style set of row houses In the "SoHo" section of Beijing(see picture), and a lovely ice cram snack from a local snack shop called "Da-Ri Quen." Ha!



We came back to the room around 5pm and shamelessly fell asleep. What adventures await us tomorrow? You'll have to come back to find out...

P.S.: to wrap up the day, I'll finish with some trivia about Beijing that I learned from our tour guide, Jane. Did you know:

That Beijing is almost the size of the country of Belgium?
That if you start in the center of the city, you can drive for 2 hours in any direction and still be in Beijing?
That Beijing's written history as a Capitol goes back over 3000 years?

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Location:Beijing, China