Taxis don't stop in front of Tiananmen!

A very unhostel-like hostel.

The little courtyard in the hostel. Gorgeous!

Outside the entrance to our hostel.

The very hard to locate alley that led to our hostel.

Am finally safely ensconced in our hutong hostel. Man, you cannot get a taxi for nothing in Beijing!

So let me do some recap of the day. Went to work. Did home visit, rapped up work stuff, zipped out of there -- freedom! Caught a ride from my friend to SF airport. Got there super early as I am want to do at airports and settled in with Blink (I actually ended up finishing the book on the plane. So much that is applicable to how I have been feeling and raised questions for me around child welfare. Anyway). The flight was 12 hours long. So needless to say I felt like a dehydrated zombie once I disembarked in Beijing. (Watched The Golden Compass and Martian Child. Why do planes always play the cheesiest American movies? They were also playing a Korean movie about a woman with a brain tumor who falls in love with the brother of her deceased husband. Isn't that like every Korean movie?) But Beijing's airport was gorgeous. You can see all the work they are putting into everything for the Olympics. I still have doubts if transportation will truly be up to snuff, as evidenced by the lack of available taxis! But more about that.

So I stuck around in baggage claim to meet my 2 friends arriving from Seoul. Chatted with a diplomat from Egypt there to meet some people arriving from Cairo. I also saw a flight arriving from Pyong Yang, which I thought was a bit wild. The airport is absolutely swank. And filled with young employees, some cutting up a bit with luggage carts. I met my friends and we grabbed a bus into Beijing. The weather is humid and appeared foggy, which turns out to be smog. So thick it is like fog. After a few hours my nose is starting to burn a bit.

So we ended up getting dropped off in front of Tiananmen, which really made real that we are in Beijing. There it is. Huge plaza, inclined planes for millions of ppl to stand and gather. Mao's face, huge and looming over the square. The whole area was dark, but bathed in lights that shone off the wet pavement. Amazing. One minute in SF, the next in Beijing. Traveling always trips me like that.

So then was the 2 hour struggle to hail a taxi. Until we found out that taxis can't stop on the big main street. And once we were able to flag down 2 taxis, after streams of filled ones, the drivers said they didn't know where our hostel was and zipped off. Crap! It was 10pm and were walking the streets not knowing ourselves how to get where we needed to go! Technology saved the day. We busted out a laptop to figure out what buses we could take. The bus ticket lady thankfully knew where were headed and about a mile off from where we were we got down at a shady alley. These hutongs remind me of pueblo streets in Mexico. Narrow and badly paved. Little shops doting the gated dwellings. Dude, one things I have to comment on is that Chinese ppl are so unhelpful! Geez, they will throw you off just so that you will leave them alone! Cursed failing of Chinese culture... Anyway. Time to get clean and showered, reposing in my nice clean hostel bed. So far so good! Not robbed! Not injured! Wee!