Ready or Not - Here We Are!

What a long day or was it two. We started out with a 3:30 am alarm to get to Portland International to catch a flight to San Francisco to grab the international connection to China.
We had a very long but uneventful flight from San Francisco to Beijing. We actually back tracked up the west coast for the pacific path to China so we got to fly over the same ground we covered earlier in the day. We have checked into the Hotel, got out SIM card from Pandaphone (it was waiting for us we we got here).

Sondra is out and about as I'm writing this to get some money changed and bottled water. We really haven't done much and as of this writing it's ~2:15am PST, which means in another hour I've been up for 24 straight.

So we took off on Thursday morning and since we crossed several time zones and the international date line we didn't get here until 2:30pm on Friday... so that's why I really am missing a couple of days.

The plane ride was very long and we had seats in the very last row so it was difficult to get any sleep, so we'll push it as long as possible to try and beat the jet lag some.

The weather is a warm 84 which is not too hot for us. We got a glimpse at the city as we took the bus from the airport to the hotel. There is a great deal of construction underway as the area is preparing for hosting the Olympics. We saw the very old mixed with the new.

Lack of "drinkable" water is the main thing that will take getting at this point. There is enough symbols or English on most of the important signs to get things figured out. I was a little shocked by the blog when I logged in as it detected that I was in China so it translated it all by default. But a few clicks later I found how to change it back to English.

The hotel beds are very firm as expected. I think it will feel fine to me after sitting in an airline seat all day.

More later... off to try some local food.