Last night in Beijing

Trip Start Dec 27, 2005
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Trip End Jan 15, 2006


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Saturday, January 14, 2006

Today was supposed to be a low key travel day to Beijing. However because of bad weather we were delayed by 7 hours. It wasn't just our flight but all flights into the Beijing area. I spoke with one of the passengers and it seemed like what was once a bad weather problem became a logistic problem once the planes started to queue up. Simply put, Beijing was overwhelmed by the number of planes.

We reached Beijing at 10:30pm and did a quick McDonalds. This was our first foray into the omnipresent chain. In this case it was the only place open at ~11pm. The menu was the same except the price for 2 meals was about $3.75. Can't beat that.

After McDs we went to a club to kill some time. We went to Club Banana, which is a 1015-esque club. Immediately you can see a huge difference between Beijing and Shanghai clubs. Here most of the patrons are local Chinese. People aren't as glamorous but are still fashionable. Music is much harsher, think Happy Hardcore techno with random R&B (and cheesy by Western standards) but the locals seem to love it. Sam and I met 2 girls whom we chatted with most of the night. One of them seemed really intellectual as she spoke decent English and was a former medical student (very difficult to get into a program in Asia) turned social worker. Once again she asked if I was from Southern China. Uncanny how they can just tell.

We talked a bit about the difference between Beijing and Shanghai people. They all say that Beijing was better. Basically according to them, Beijing people were "real", better educated, and generous. Shanghainese were fake and cheap. It was interesting to see how strong the reaction was to Shanghainese. Much of the stereotyped differences sounded like N. California people and S. California people which was amusing. The one thing that I noticed was the size of the bouncers here. My goodness, they were all 6'4" and ripped. They had such an upright and no-nonsense attitude that I was convinced that these must have been moonlighting soldiers. Long story short, if it was security they wanted to convey, the obviously did a great job. W/so many of them around staring and holding large maglites they were definitely an imposing presence.

We ended the night pretty early as we had to catch a flight back to the US the next day. Hopefully we won't have the insane flight delays tomorrow as we had today.
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