Beijing

We made it to Beijing and it is raining outside. It gets dark here earlier in the evening. It was a warm and humid day.

The ride in the airplane was pleasant. We met in the lobby in Tokyo at 6:45 am and took bus for around an hour to the airport. I took lots of pictures of all of us at the airports. Basically, we wait in lines. There is a line to check your luggage and a line to go through security. There is a line for customs and a line to get on the airplane. Everybody was friendly and efficient and it really did not take that long.

Judy had to step aside and have them pass a wand over her. Of course,they found nothing. Other than that, it was uneventful. They gave us plenty to eat and drink on the plane.I had a couple of cans of Perrier, a cup of coffee, some snack things and a fish meal. I thought the fish meal was pretty good but several others did not like it. It was different. It had things like scallops, imitation crab, rice, noodles,mushrooms, fish, vegetables and pudding. Not much at all like what I would normally eat.

The Beijing airport is only three months old and it is very pretty and very big. They are getting ready for all of the traffic of the Olympics. We rode a train to get to our luggage. Our group had 19 people.The rest of the 72 or 73 people were coming on a later plane. Grady and Peggy were on the later flight.

We took a bus to the hotel for about an hour. Our luggage came separately and was delivered to our rooms. We went out to eat in a pretty restaurant. There was a lazy susan in the center of the table and they put rice and several dishes on it for the 9 of us at each table to share.There were things like pepper beef,eggplant, lemon chicken,cabbage, spicy beef with vegetables, noodles in sauce, beef with melon, chicken with vegetables and watermelon, plus hot tea.
It was good. We ate with chopsticks. The other table ate more than we did so they came over and got our big bowls to finish off. The only one in our group that did not go was Vera. She is resting with a bit of a cold.

Before we took the bus, we went for a walk a few blocks. You have to watch out, even when the light is green for pedestrians, traffic des not stop. They just keep going. There is almost no difference between the sidewalk and the street. There is no curb, just painted lines in some places, and cars drive on what we would call the sidewalk. Traffic is very busy. Cars just push their way in traffic. It would be stressful for me to drive in it.