Troubles of a Tired Traveler

It happened. I made a mistake while we were traveling. Granted I've been in Hong Kong for five months and traveled to four other countries before I made my first big mistake, but it wasn't too fun especially while playing tour guide for Mom.

We had an early flight out to Beijing from Shanghai so that meant waking up at 5am again and getting an hour long taxi ride to Pudong airport. After paying our cab driver and going inside to check in I looked at the departure board for our flight. Nothing. Couldn't see it. Maybe our flight number changed? Doubt it.

A lady at an information counter helped us and informed me politely than I'm a moron. I had gotten us successfully to the WRONG airport. With a little less than an hour and a half before our flight we rushed out of the airport and headed 45 minutes across town to the other airport in Shanghai.

Luckily we made the flight and arrived safely in Beijing 3 hours later. After sitting in traffic for over an hour we made it to the Beijing Doubletree Hotel (thanks for the Hilton points Dad!) and took a breather after a very stressful morning.

Highlights of the hotel included:

1. A warm American chocolate chip cookie upon check in
2. A big squishy King bed
3. A very clean bathroom with a rain-head shower

After settling in we decided to venture out into the city.

Initial impressions of Beijing:

1. There is a lot of traffic
2. The news has not exaggerated the amount of pollution
3. English speaking locals are a rarity- you have to be prepared with Mandarin written out for all cabs.
4. Its unusual to see other Westerners here (I thought HK was bad)
5. The number of people here is insane.

We arrived at Wangfujing Shopping Street which turned out to be a very large mall and a long street of very Western stores. Not exactly what we had in mind but it was still fun to take it all in.

We stumbled across a market that sold some interesting street food and had a lot of different nik-naks for sale. 

The most overwhelming part of our trip out was definitely the number of people in the streets and also the fact that taxis did not want to pick up people. We later found out that this is because there are designated pick-up taxi spots, but the fact that taxis were not picking us up scared Fi a lot and soured our attitudes for the rest of the day. It got to the point where Mom tried to push me into a taxi- not a good idea.

We finally made it back to the hotel and had a very unsatisfactory meal at the restaurant. The apple juices we ordered also cost us an outrageous amount of $7 dollars each! The rest of our night was spent relaxing, watching more censored news, and me working on a homework assignment. Tomorrow we would venture out on a guided tour of the city (we feared going at it alone after all the taxi debacles)!

The dreaded taxi...