Day 1

My first flight went without a hitch, and was quite exhilarating really.  I was lucky enough to have a window seat, so I could see the area spread below me.  We ascended parallel to M6, but reached the clouds before I could see much of anything I knew.  O'Hare is a busy place, and our flight to Beijing had 251 seats, and only at the end did a baby cry.  There wasn't much sleep to be had for me due to room constraints, but I did manage some.

Quit aside: I was talking with the guy next to me, and he was saying that one of the guys was prepared for a 25 hour flight, which was ridiculous to me, and I said so, we laughed and that was it.  Later, about 9 hours into the flight, I realized that I'd been preparing for a 25 hour flight as well, expecting to arrive in China at 4:30pm on the 7th, Michigan time rather than Beijing time.  So that made me feel a bit stupid, but I kept it to myself and had a bit of a laugh at my own expense.  In any case I was relieved.

We arrived at Beijing's beautiful airport and made it through customs quickly and easily (I found that my suitcase has the loudest of all wheels).  Our bus driver took us to the hotel (about an hour away), and we got our rooms and unpacked.  The night was then ours, so I went with my room-mate Marshall, two guys from the next room Josh and Derek, Prof. and Mrs. Jen, Sarah and Mrs. VanDrunen to the night market.  We took the subway there and back for 4 Yuan total.  The market was ridiculous: street vendors called out in attempted English, eager to draw people in.  The fares were very diverse.  We had fried scorpion, fried squid legs (sorry Scott), fried silk worm and massive fried crayfish.  The only one that tasted good was the scorpion, strangely.  The picture is of a plate of scorpions, which are very similar to the one I ate.  The crayfish tail I ate was massive, horrible and very very salty.  I would not recommend it!

It looks like China will take some getting used to, but we have Amanda and Yang to help, as well as the Prof's and their wives, so I think we will do just fine.  Learning the subway etiquette was fun, so if that's any indication of how the trip will go, I'm in for a great time.

Well, it's good night for me pretty soon; we have Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, the Pearl Market and Temple of Heaven tomorrow.  I'll update as I have internet access.  For now it looks like the hostel we are at gives it for free, so the first batch of pictures should be at home for Jeff to take care of.  Most were taken from a moving bus, at night through foggy glass, but I expect the rest of the pictures from the trip to be much better.

Good night from the Middle Kingdom,

Steve

P.S. Many things are blocked, including Blogger, but Gmail is not, so posting should not be a problem.