China Day 1

I promised Mark I would try to send a day-by-day journal of my trip and since it is 5 am on Friday and I am wide awake, I thought I would take a shot at this.

Wednesday flights were pretty uneventful.  Fully half of the group was at the airport at 5:30 am when I arrived and check-in was easier.  Slight scare when one of my travelers said our flight was delayed by 3 hours! Turns out that the delayed flight was the 6:00 am flight, not our 7:22 am flight.  Whew!  That flight still had not left when we did.
 
Loooooong layover in O'Hare.  Our flight to Beijing on time.  I thought I would feel bad for being in Business class but I didn't so much since my seat was in the last row and near the galley!  Noisy and busy.  Also, the only people on the plane older and fatter than me were the flight attendants! OMG!  One even walked with a pronounced rocking limp that was painful to watch.  And these were not friendly people.
 
Anyway, we arrive in Beijing to long lines and lots of traffic.  Our guide was waiting for us outside of Customs and she is a friendly little Chinese woman who we are to call "Joan".  Apparently her Chinese name is too hard to pronounce.  She gave us a lot of good information about China on the 90 minute drive into the city.  Beijing is NOT the most populated Chinese city with 21 million people.  First place goes to Chunging on the Southern coast,  2nd to Shanghai and then Beijing.
Also, there are 80,000 characters in the Chinese written language but they only use about 5000 in daily writing.  My brain froze up after that.

Got to the hotel (Marriott City Wall - very nice and great beds!  No more sand pillows) and had 20 minutes to get ready for dinner with the representative from the U.S. Embassy and, of course, then he was late.  Surprised by Nancy leading a group, hand-holding grace before we ate!  What?  Are we going to have to do that before every meal?  I thought there was no G in LEAD!?!
No wine with dinner (and after that, I really needed some!) but everyone so tired it was hard to eat.  We had our first of many, I suppose, family style dinners with the lazy Susan in the middle of the table and at least a dozen unpronounceable, too cold, unidentifiable dishes that really did not fill us up.  No rice!  Lots of water.  I am very glad I have all of those Gold Fish crackers in my suitcase.  Colin and Esa need to come over here and teach these people a thing or two about seasoning.
Finally, finally, after an hour of very boring speeches about genetic seeds and research (they are all for it) and beef trade embargoes (they are all against those), we were free to go to bed at 10 pm.  My roommate, Lois, is a very nice person from Minden but I hate sharing a room with someone who doesn't love me!  Anyway, she had a bad night (up a lot with diarrhea) so once she is out of the (very nice) bathroom I am going to shower and head out into the day.  Full day of sightseeing, ending with a Peking duck dinner.  Hope it is better than last nights!