The impressions of Beijing - part 1

Even though I grew up in Guangzhou, China, which is in the south, I've never been to Beijing. It was always my unspoken dream to go to Beijing - to see the famous Great Wall, Forbidden City and all that. Southerners and Northerners of China are very different - from dietary habits to other customs - so I'm very curious and excited to find out what Beijing is all about.

After an 11-hour flight eastbound, we reached Beijing Capital International Airport in the middle of the day. The word "Capital" in Chinese (the first city) gave me a sense of authority and priority. The airport was like any other metropolitan airports, yet there was an added sense of security and seriousness. It was so large, the place seemed quite empty with just us from one flight. We followed the others and walked quietly from the gate to where a lot of people made several queues. Securities were there to direct people to line up at the right places: foreigners v.s. Chinese national lines. The people at customs all had baby faces, and they were serious yet courteous, just like what I would expect. Of course, no photos were allowed at customs.

After we got through customs, we were kind of on our own, and counting on me to get us to the hotel.  I made several fruitless inquiries and got us lined up at one of the taxi queues, and eventually got us a taxi. I told the driver the name of the hotel, and he answered with a kind of uncertainty. After we settled in and he started driving, I found him putting the destination, Wangfujing, in his smartphone's GPS. The ride out of the airport was a breeze, and I was impressed by the lots of trees along the highway, it reminded me of the ride out of Austin International Airport. Unfortunately the air problem of Beijing was real even at the suburb, because everything was under a film of grey. When we got close to Beijing, traffic got really heavy. It was well-known that Beijing and its suburbs were labelled as rings. The outer most places were the 5th ring, and that's where the airport was. The center of the city, the hotel where we were staying, was in the 1st ring, which was walking distance to the Forbidden City and Tienanmen Square. A lot of people live around 4th or 3rd ring, including my coworker in the Beijing office and our tour guide.

We stayed in the Crowne Plaza in Wangfujing. Wangfujing is one of the most famous areas in Beijing, for its Luxury shops (a little like downtown San Francisco around Union Square), local food street and shops of Chinese cultural gifts, it's direct translation was "the well of Duke's residence." When the taxi reached the hotel, a tall and skinny young bell man came to open our door. The taxi fare was 101 yuen (Chinese currency, $1 is equivalent to 6.5 yuen), but I told him that I only had 100 yuen bills, and was kind of embarrassed when the friendly taxi driver said it was OK to just give him 100 yuen. The people at the front desk were really friendly. A young man (from here on, all the hotel staff were skinny, good looking and very young) helped us to get our room, and I let him practice his English with Jack. He was a little shy therefore spoke softly, but his English was good.

We got to our room, which was said to be free upgraded. It was 5 PM local time, and we were exhausted. Beijing local time is 15 hours ahead of San Francisco time. We had a King bed, but the room was kind of narrow and weirdly shaped as if it was half of a larger room. In the next few days, I discovered other quirkiness of the hotel and our room, such as gurgling draining system in the middle of the night; smelly steam room and smell swimming towels, and rough toilet papers (luckily I brought my own toilet paper and box of Kleenex!) To my relieve, we did have seated toilet, working bath tub and shower, and the plumbing and electrical sort of working properly. I did have my doubts about our hotel, but all were made up by the big spread of breakfast buffet, which we looked forward to every morning at 6 AM for the next three days!

I might have stretched it, because I arranged to meet my Beijing office co-worker for dinner, and dragged Jack along with me.

To be continued.