It is after midnight here and we are getting ready to crash! We are exhausted after our long trip and are glad to be in our daughter's city. We have a great guide, Tom, who will be with us the eleven days that we are in Beijing. It was kind of scary when we got off the plane in a strange country, went through customs, got our bags and Tom was nowhere to be found at the front of airport. When you are surrounded by Asian men you keep looking for a guy holding a sign with our last name. Plus, I was frantic because I could not get the VPN to work in the airport so I could not find the email with his phone number in it. Just as The Rock found the email on his phone (after searching the entrances for 15-20 minutes) he found us! We were very relieved!
What we learned about Beijing from Tom is:
1. There are 20,000,000 people in Beijing and about half of those live downtown in these high rise apartments they keep adding onto.
2. Apparently Friday night is the night when everyone goes out to dinner and parties because traffic was horrendous!
3. Many of the drivers drive like The Rock, no signals when changing lanes, flashing their headlights when someone is going to slow and just weaving in and out of the lanes. I was constantly hitting The Rock because I could barely watch where the driver was going.
4. English is the #2 spoken language in the city. We had no problem maneuvering around the airport because everything was in English.
5. The new elected government officials take office next week, so Beijing will be highly protected from their police officers because of this event.
6. During the past two weeks 9,000,000 people left Beijing to go home to their provinces for Chinese New Year. Apparently traffic was great while they were gone!
We cannot wait to see Beijing in the daytime when we have more energy.
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