Flying in Beijing

1148 7-20-10

Since I'm waiting for our plane to come in (which has been delayed 40min) I figured I would try to write part of today's post while I had a second.

Dad and I got up around 6:30 or so, which was fine since we went to bed around 10.  I got o take a shower in the morning, which was amazing, I actually should have probably taken the time to take a bath but I just didn't think about it.  Not having to stand next to your toilet while showering is such a nice convenience.

After my shower we headed up to the executive lounge where we got a really nice breakfast… in fact besides the odd dried banana chips it's probably the only breakfast I've had in the last few months.  Sadly it wasn't till we were done that I noticed they had bread and Nutella.  Once breakfast was consumed we hoped on the train and after a bit of confusion with gates got onto our plane.

[cont. 2116 7-21-10]

The flight itself was rather uneventful, but once we got to Beijing our epic quest to find our hostel began.  First we got to take the express train and another subway line to our stop.  From there we walked for about 15 minutes down a main street turned into an apartment neighborhood which was very old and rather typical.  Our walk then brought us strolling by a large Chinese market place and then down this small back alley.  We finally ended up at a rather large red door.  At this point my father was beginning to question my judgment.  But the door actually opened up into a rather quaint courtyard with nice decorations and a fruit bearing tree in the middle!

The girl at the desk in the back (Sammy) was super nice, had decent English skills, and was rather helpful.  It wasn't her fault that the A/C broke, and then they turned out the power to fix it.  My father was so tired though that he even was able to ignore the "hard" (which were actually softer than the one in my dorm) mattress and heat and went straight to sleep.  I stayed outside in the courtyard and talked with some Norway people, who were quite lovely.  They were actually finishing up a trip that they took on the Siberian Train.

Once dad woke up from his nap we went, met Booz and got some dinner at a hotpot restaurant.  Then we headed up to this really big open market like area where we saw life scorpions on impaled on a stick!  They would then fry them for you so that you could eat them without worrying about that nasty stinger.  They were super tasty!!

Just kidding.  I did end up buying some fans though for my father.  They started out at 120RMB and ended up at 25.  Afterwards we wondered around, got some tea, someone wanted to practice their English with us, which of course is a royal scam, and in general just kind of moseyed along.

Getting back was a royal pain though.  First of all we thought we found some cabs but they immediately started trying to negotiate with us on a price, which is the biggest red flag in the book that they are not legit.  I have never before run into this problem in Shanghai, but apparently here it's a big deal.  If that wasn't bad enough it takes us another 20minutes to flag down another taxi (all the others either had people in them, or didn't want to stop for us, I'm not entirely sure why).  Once we got in we explained to him where we wanted to go, but he didn't want to because he would have to make a u-turn… yeah I'm serious.  Finally it took us an additional 20 minutes waiting at a hotel to finally find someone that was able to take us to the hostel.  This was after several taxi drivers said they didn't even know where our train stop was and it's a major one.  I was pretty peeved at this point.  I climb into a taxi at 3am and in my broke Chinese tell them to take me to ECUST and the street next to it and am immediately taken there with no problem, ever.  Here they can't even get us to a train station.  Shanghai 1 : Beijing 0

Needless to say when we got back I crashed pretty easily.