Beijing

We arrived in Beijing after a safe smooth flight, and there was snow on the ground. I have to say it wasn’t as beautiful as landing at the Anchorage airport and looking out the window and seeing the mountains and trees covered with thick snow – but it was a close second, a new place, and a new adventure. We arrived late but grabbed a Starbucks on our way to the taxi line, happy to be back in a big, clean, civilized city. Jimmy and I have been spoiled and become a little soft going to school in Chicago, even though we can hack it in the woods, there is something totally comfortable about a big modern city. We took a cab to the Happy Dragon Hostel and check in to a four-person dorm. In the morning we were up and showed and on our way to the International Hotel Beijing to buy our train tickets for the Tran Siberian. We were told the train did not leave until Tuesday for Ulaanbaatar and it was only Thursday. We spent the weekend doing tourist stuff like going to the Forbidden City, the home of the Chinese Emperors, visiting Tiananmen Square, seeing the tomb of Mao, and the two story KFC that is directly diagonal his burial spot. We also visited the great wall, hiking up and then tobogganing down. The rest of our time was spent walking around the different Hulongs or Chinese neighborhoods that look very much like what I thought China would look like, gray blue connected traditional homes with tiled roofs and completely walled. We also spent a good amount of time downloading books and movies to the computer and the kindle to make sure be were prepared for our 90+-hour train ride that we had ahead of us. In addition we saw the movie 2012, which features China and the Chinese, seemed to love it, lots of ooing and awing in the theater. The night before our train, which was to leave a 7 am the next day we went to the store an bought some food – it was a great place, Chinas version of Whole foods and we were able to find some cheese, be it laughing cow spreadable cheese, but it was great, because cheese is not that popular in China and I was having a total craving. I was done with Chinese food and wondering why Jimmy and I did not just go to Italy for the year and have cheese and wine all day. The next morning we were up early and boarded the train with plenty of time to spare. The next leg of our trip was about to start!