China Day 1

About a week and a half ago my roommate, Aaron, and I left Japan and headed on a 5 day whirlwind trip of the Beijing area. It was a great trip and I got to experience a lot of stuff that I had wanted to for years.

The first morning I wake up and was surprisingly not hungover from the previous night's fun. I toss some stuff into my pack and we head off towards the nearest train station with a line to the airport. We get through the airport stuff, get some Chinese money and finally we get onto the plane.

Once we land in Tianjin (both me and my roommate thought we were flying into Beijing, shows how much we paid attention to the brochures) we went through the Immigration stations. I was a bit worried since my stuff had been slightly misspelled (my passport has my middle name misspelled and even though it was corrected on an amendment page, no one ever pays attention to it so I'm constantly having problems). My worrying was for naught as nothing happened. I went through and met our tour guide.

Our tour guide Mr. Lee was a very nice guy and spoke great Japanese. Yup the entire tour was done in Japanese. That proved to be quite interesting. Once everyone was together we headed to a "cultural shopping center". Boy, was that a learning experience. This was the first instance where I could really see the difference between Japanese and Chinese people. I looked over in time to see a woman spit right on the floor. Now I don't mind spitting (usually), but inside? I mean that was pretty gross. After that we headed to Beijing.

By the time we got to Beijing it was dark and everyone was pretty tired. I was beat even though I slept most of the way from Tianjin. We make a quick stop at this shopping center with this huge television screen. It was pretty neat. I got a Starbucks coffee in order to make change. I made it back to the bus in time to make it to dinner. Dinner was good. It was Sichuan food. I think this was my favorite of all the meals we had. It was simply amazing. Everything was nice and spicy.

After dinner we were taken to our hotel. It turned out to be a Best Western. Now the Best Westerns I've been to in the States have been nice, but this place looked to be a 3-4 star hotel. There was a nice chandelier in the lobby, all the staff were wearing nice uniforms. I was pretty stunned. There was even a dance club on the third floor. So we check into our rooms and due to the stresses of traveling all day, we just lazed around.