Belated Beijing

This was an entry I wrote back in mid-August. I tried posting it during my trip but Blogger is blocked in China. So this has been sitting in my inbox for the last 5 months....

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Sorry for the lapse in entries. I blame it on a combination of being
too busy and about 10 scoops of procrastination (rooting through
photos and prepping them for web use takes a surprisingly long time).
Regardless, here I am. For now I'm going to skip the remaining India
stories and any anything else in between. At this point, I figure I
can always come back to them and anyway, it's my blog isn't it? (Which
also means I'm free to make excuses for myself LOL)

On to the real entry:

So here I am in Beijing, China. My mom was invited/decided to come for
a visit so I decided to tag along. Due to varying plane schedules she
won't arrive until tomorrow night but I arrived today after a long and
semi-painful trip that consisted of a personal delay at the Doha
airport; rushing to catch my plane; a seriously stinky ride to China
(not sure if it was the airline food or what but the people around
me.... phew); the longest and slowest customs process I've even
experienced (granted it included a run through the quarantine and
health check so maybe it'd be a little faster otherwise); getting to
the currency exchange to find out that they won't exchange Riyals I
brought along; finally catching a cab to the hotel, dozing off, and
getting jarred awake by a fender bender. If only I could understand
Chinese... I bet the driver let a few gems rip when he rear-ended that
other cab.

All in all it wasn't too bad of a trip though. Traveling is always a
bit discombobulating so I was expecting it to a degree... it's just
amusing that it always makes for a story.

Once in my hotel I was exhausted and pushing about 24 hours without
sleep I realized I needed to grab dinner otherwise I'd wake up in the
middle of the night starving. Turns out I woke up anyway because the
a/c turned off and my neighbors were celebrating the end of a good
night out in the hallway. But I digress... so I wandered out into the
late Beijing afternoon to find a place to eat and walked into the
first busy restaurant I saw, opened up the menu and it was all in
Chinese (no translation). The waitress loudly informed me (not sure
why it came out so loud) that she "don't speak English." So I tried to
gesture to get her to just pick a dish for me. When that didn't work,
I flapped my arms like a chicken to try to explain that I'd eat
chicken. When that didn't work, I pointed at a picture and just
succumbed to luck that I had picked a dish with chicken meat rather
than offal. When it arrived, it still looked like chicken but I have
to admit I'm really not sure if it was. It had a fishy, scallop kind
of texture but the flavor wasn't really fishy and there was a spice in
it that kept making my tongue numb. But it tasted pretty good, the
texture was somewhat familiar, and I was hungry. On my way back to the
hotel I veered the long way and was sidetracked by a man selling his
and his students' paintings. He turned out to be a pretty convincing
salesman because I wound up walking out of the gallery with two
paintings. "You don't need to check with your husband, he'd be happy
with whatever you want." "Here, I write your name in Chinese as gift,"
and he proceed to write two beautiful Chinese characters. He gave me
this whole spiel about what each character represented and then its
deeper meaning but he could've written "American Sucker" and I
wouldn't have had a clue otherwise. In fact, I wonder if he's ever
done that to an annoying tourist.

Tomorrow I visit Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City, that is, if I
can manage to fall back asleep. Ciao for now.