Zev and I breezed through our direct 14 hour flight to Beijing and arrived at our ‘spartan’ accommodations in one of the older neighborhoods near the Forbidden City. On the flight we were lucky enough to have 3 seats to ourselves and really sprawled out. We packed an excellent bag of snacks including clementines, granola bars, wasabi peas, and bagels, thus managing to avoid most of the plane food.

The internet here is iffy, and we’re learning the vagaries of internet in China. Facebook is non-existent (we anticipated this), Google is spotty, but strangely Bing seems to work like a charm.

We got about 4 hours of sleep the night before our flight and only managed to squeeze in an hour or two of shuteye on the plane. The next few days will be spent taking it easy and acclimating to our new surroundings. Can’t wait to get out and explore the Zhengjue Hutong area near our hostel tomorrow!

Dinner was at the first restaurant we could find with English on the wall. We had steamed buns with pickled cucumber and lotus root on the side.