I made it!

So, I’m finally here with some free time to start up this blog! The trip here was long, but not as torturous as I thought it would be. The flight to Chicago was pretty easy - I read a bit and actually ended up falling asleep for a few. Once we got to Chicago, we got lunch together as a group at Chili’s and then got on the flight. Of course I had a middle-middle seat. Awesome. It ended up being okay though…it was an entire row of us from the Bentley trip, so it was cool to chat with everyone. There were some pretty random movies on the flight – I ended up watching this Nicholas Sparks movie with Richard Gere- obviously I ended up crying like an idiot, great. I probably slept like 7 hours off and on, but it was still a really long time (13 hours) to be cramped on a plane.

The hotel we’re staying at in Beijing is nice – it’s in between the 2^nd and 3^rd circles of the city (I think there are 6 in total) and it’s a Park Plaza… for some reason I was picturing something like the one in Boston, not quite..but it’s not so bad. I’m rooming with a girl named Lauren – she met up with us at the airport in Beijing because she was traveling to the west coast and then to Bangkok before coming on the trip..it sounds like she had a really fun time. We get along well so far, she’s cool. For some reason the rooms here are stifling hot, just like they were in Korea! I discovered that the window opened today, so that’s good..haha.

The first night we were all pretty out of it, but we went down to the hotel restaurant for a late group dinner. We sat at 2 large round tables, each with a large rotating glass plate in the middle. Waiters and waitresses kept bringing out plate upon plate of communal Chinese dishes – we had duck, beef, chicken, lamb, all different kinds of fish (even jelly fish!) and a ton of other seaweed, vegetables, fruits and desserts. I even ate 100 year old goose eggs- I know, weird. The plates would sit on the large glass plate and people would turn the plate until the dish they wanted was in reach. I was thankful that I had so much practice using chopsticks in Korea- really came in handy. Way wayyy too much food for us to ever dream of eating, but I guess that’s a big part of Chinese culture- It would be embarrassing to not have enough food, so they tend to lavish their guests and potential business partners.

I fell asleep almost instantly when we got back from dinner at like 10:00…woke up a few times at night, but convinced myself to fall back asleep. . glad that I got a good night sleep though because there was a long day ahead.