Beijing Part 1

Since I'm not at home to follow Collin's shenanigans , I thought I would document my own for a while. It's 4:30 AM and I'm in Beijing. I'm up at 4:30 AM because I am suffering from a condition known as jet lag. That's when your body desperately thinks you are on one continent but your watch insists you you are on another. Luckily it generally only lasts until the day before you go home then you get to do it all over again. I set one big goal for myself on this trip. I am not going to get sick!! Every time I have been to Asia I have gotten sick to some degree. The only way to travel here and guarantee that you will not is to to bring your own food, water and air. This is not very practical so you just have to do the best you can. The first time I came here I got horribly sick the first couple of days and couldn't eat much for the rest of the trip. The thought of food just grossed me out and I lost 7 or 8 pounds. I also found out that I can survive for quite a while on nothing but beer and water. Part of the problem is that they have a small pollution problem. It's sort of like walking though a forest fire while sucking on a muffler. After 3 or 4 days you WILL be coughing up globs of stuff. Stomach issues are just as hard to avoid. But not this time!! I hope.

This is the first leg of a marathon trip that will also take me to Shanghai and Bangalore, India ultimately flying 26,000 miles and all the way around the world. This is my 4th trip to China but my first to Beijing and its quite a place. I really like China, mostly because it is absolutely jam packed with Chinese people - they still like Americans here and you see it everywhere you go. There are things you can take for granted in the US like telling a taxi driver where you want to go. You can't do that here, but you can take for granted people will be generally nice, hardworking and very eager to please. But the thing that sticks out is their attitude. There is none of the whining and complaining that I run across so often in my line of work. People will do whatever it takes.

Anyway, my trip started at 4Am on Halloween morning. I left for the airport, flew to Chicago, waited a couple of hours then flew to Shanghai. A 14 1/2 hour flight. I'm usually pretty good at sleeping on planes, but for some reason I didn't do well and slept maybe 3 hours total. I did watch half of The Lost season 4 and a couple of movies so it was time well spent but by the time I got into Shanghai I was completely wiped. I flew on American Airlines over but my flight from Shanghai to Beijing was on Air China. I had to claim my bags, go through immigration, then customs, then re-check in on Air China. I wandered through the terminal hopelessly searching for the Air China counters. I finally gave up and went to another airline to deliver my usual appeal for help when in foreign country. First: "do you speak English?" If yes, then, "hello, I am a stupid lost American, can you please tell me how to get to..." It turned out that I had to leave the terminal and take a bus to another one that looked exactly like the first one. So I went to the other terminal, checked in, went through security and barely made the flight. Air China is a lot like Southwest Airlines only without the big comfortable seats and tons of leg room. 3 hours later I finally made it to Beijing. About 28 hours total door to door.

I managed to sleep until 6:30 AM the next morning and felt pretty good. I didn't have any work to do that day so I decided to do a little shopping and sight seeing. I love taking the subways overseas. Much faster than a taxi and it's a whole adventure in it's own to figure out how to get where you want to go - also westerners don't usually use it, so I get to be the tallest person on a packed subway car. So I got a map and headed off for the big crazy market where they try to pull you into the stalls and you haggle endlessly over prices. The Chinese should have definitely forced having haggling as an Olympic sport because they would have cleaned up. Specifically I needed cell phones for myself and coworkers. They are cheap and it's better to just buy a local one than pay crazy US rates overseas. I did some good haggling, got some phones then met a nice couple from Canada. This was their first trip over and they were a little wide-eyed at the market scene. I helped them with the shopping for a couple of hours and got a few things for myself.

Afterwords, I had a little time to kill before my co-workers arrived so I went to the forbidden city. I didn't really want to go inside, I just wanted to see that big photo of Chairman Mao that we all saw so much of during the Olympics. I also saw Tiananmen square, so I can check those 2 off the list.

I headed back to the hotel, met up with my coworkers and then it was nap time. Our load in started at midnight that night and I knew I had several long days ahead of me. I'm in full work mode now for a couple of days (which means I go from my hotel room to the ballroom at about 7Am then back to my room at about 10PM - so no free time), but we have Friday and Saturday off. I'll do some more sight seeing then, then its off to Shanghai. More to come...