Beijing Hotels
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arrival
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the 15th of march, 2008, a date marked on all the calendars i've owned for the past several months (just one), had finally arrived after a wait encroaching on two years. the whole waiting process was interesting, to say the least. of course, both jesse and i'd had the pleasure of experiencing the anticipation that waiting for a trip this immense could bring, but beyond that, the excitement of this anticipation was mired in two quite unordinary and unexpected circumstances. one, the bog that is the cultural and mental stimulation of being an "english teacher" in korea, and two, the onslaught, in our last three months on this asian peninsula, of a series of quite shocking and unfortunate events. i'm not going to go into the details here, but suffice it to say that both of us were more than ready to put the past behind us and embark on our journey.
so after two months of the kind of downtime at home i knew i wouldn't be able to indulge in for at least another year, jesse and i got on our air china flight at san francisco international bound for beijing on a perfect bay area saturday afternoon. we couldn't have asked for a smoother departure. we armed ourselves with ample ammo for the worst we expected to endure: airplane food that left much to be desired. with our sexy (gladly overpacked) ospreys and arms laden with peet's coffee and thai chicken pizza from willow's, a favorite airport haunt of jesse's, we glided through inspections and onto our plane.
although air china's food leaves me somehow less satisfied than i was before eating it, i have to say that i was glad to be flying in a recycled aircraft this time. i think regulation seating dimensions were larger in the past than they are on today's more modern airplanes. or, on a more hopfeful note, perhaps i've lost a bit of weight in the past month, and am able to fold myself more comfortably into tiny spaces...? at any rate, i found space to be, if not quite ample, very sufficient. which, by today's standards, is saying a lot. it also helped to be sitting next to jesse, who was in the aisle seat, and thus to have a readily available shoulder and lap to rest my weary limbs and head on. it's nice having a man around sometimes. ;-)
thanks to a favorable departure time, we arrived in beijing at an hour conducive to minimizing the pangs of jetlag. we'd gotten a few hours of fitful half-sleep on the plane, and had tiredness to spare to sleep. checking into our hotel proved, in retrospect, to be mildly (though it didn't feel so at the time, walking around a dimly lit beijing with 40 lb packs on our backs, disoriented after just getting off a 14 hr. flight) inconvenient. street addresses were difficult to read, and it being night, and my first time in china, i felt defeated before even being so. luckily, we found the place after stopping for directions just once.
the room, smaller than pictured (a shocker), and slightly more dingy, nonetheless gave us exactly what we were paying: about a third of the ridiculous rack rate (fourth night free). yay internet. already proving to be priceless.
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