Travel to beijing

Wednesday, 9/1 written by Priscilla

So our flight to Beijing went well. We flew British Airways, Cathay Pacific, and Dragon Air. Our favorite airline was British Airways, followed by Dragon Air, and worst was Cathay Pacific. Cathay leg room is limited with a very poorly placed stepper making it more tight, but it did have a decent selection of movies. Alan and I watched The story of mari and the three puppies, while steph watched a disney movie. If you don't know the movie alan and I watched, I highly recommend you do. It's about four shiba inu, the dog I really cute and smart...I totally want one. Alan thought it was cute too. I also wanted to be infused with the chinese culture, so I watched a cantonese movie - love is everywhere - also.

Despite the lack of leg room, steph and I really enjoyed the chinese food on the plane, even though we had to share one chicken and rice dish (they ran out) and the chicken congee was alright (but they had it). We also missed out on the cup of noodles because we were too slow in our request.

As you can tell we, meaning steph and I, were totally missing chinese food and ecstatic to be eating lots of it soon. Despite how everyone generalizes chinese food as one type of food, there are many regions with different tastes, can't wait to try them all. We already began our indulgence by having ramen and curry pork with rice at the hong kong airport.

We arrived at the Beijing airport a little bit over than an hour before erik arrived. Steph and I took the time to clean up ourselves, while alan explored the airport. In his exploration, he found out erik was arriving at the old airport, and not the cool new one like we did. So we had to take a bus ride over there. We were glad to find erik in his new polo and plaid shorts and a semi-big backpack waiting for us patiently at the arrival exit. It's been a while since we've seen him, so it was very nice to have him join us.

We took a cab to meet charles, steph's college friend, by his work place where we ate a late lunch. It was hard to imagine I was still hungry after eating so much during my travels, but knowing me I can never refuse good food. We ordered family style with way too many good dishes. We then went our separate ways since steph and I are staying with charles while erik and alan are staying at a days inn.

As we drove around in a taxi, we were amazed that beijing is very modern with many beautiful skyscrapers built the last 5 years. Beijing also was very olympic oriented with all the advertisements changed from olympics to paralympics already.

Steph and I were relieved to be staying at a nice clean apartment taking a shower without flip flops. Little pleasures in life. After some chill time erik and alan came over for some drinks before going out. Charles stirred up some jack and green tea for us. It was surprisingly good, but strong.

We then headed out to china doll, which is a bar/club. Given it was monday night it was pretty empty, but we still had a good time with our beers and mojitos. We then started getting hungry so we had pizza and belgian beers at 10pm. After some yummy in our tummy, we called it quits.