As promised, here are the pictures of the hostel room where I stayed the first night. It's not quite the Ritz.
The view from the front door
China can be Cheap (but might not be)
The other day I was wandering around (have you noticed I do that a lot?) and I came across a large shopping center. The best part of going to shopping centers is that they all seem to be air conditioned. In my past trips to Beijing, this hasn’t really mattered because it has usually been cool when I visited. This time, however, summer is raging. I talked to a Chinese guy yesterday and he told me that this year was hotter than usual.
I went inside and rode the escalators to the top (6th) floor. Inside were shops of all kinds. It looked about the same as many urban malls in America with clothing, appliance, sportswear and several Chinese versions of Victoria’s Secret. I spent some time looking at clothes at Uniglo and eventually ended up in the stationery section of a department store looking at pens and notebooks. My pen had run out of ink and I was looking to replace it. I finally settled on a Pilot V5 Hi-Techpoint, an updated version of a pen of mine that recently ran out of ink. It has liquid black ink and a small point that allows me to write fairly quickly, something that is important with as many words as I write these days.
The Dungeon
Like I mentioned before, I am trying to improve my writing skills and I want to be able to create pictures with words. The room where I stayed the first night in Beijing is a good opportunity for me to do this. I’ll include pictures at the end so that you can compare the image in your head with what I describe. (I'm having trouble so I'm going to put the pictures in later.)
The hostel where I stayed had rooms both above and below ground. Mine was underground. As I descended down the three flights of stairs, I remembered all of the sketchy places I had stayed in the past. This one was surely going to be memorable, whether or not it made my top ten list of weird cheap lodging.
Airport to Hotel
The arrival at Beijing International Airport was uneventful. There were some slow moving lines at the immigration checkpoint, but the Chinese officials soon changed some of the foreigner lines over to general entry lines, and I quickly made it through. It continues to be a mystery to me why some lines would move so much faster than others.
I would have liked to have been Zachary Auerbach today. There was a hostess at the airport who kept walking around baggage claim with a white piece of paper with his name typed on it. The third time she walked by, I looked a little closer at it. Apparently, she worked for the Ritz-Carlton and was going to take him there. That would have been nice. My Chinese language skills were not good enough to convince her that I was Zachary, so after picking up my bag, I walked over to where the express train from the airport to downtown leaves from. As I walked out of the airport and into the train station, I realized I was not in Portland any more. The blanket of heat nearly knocked me over.