Day 1

We made it in Monday at about 5 pm local time (Sunday at 4 am Florida time) and checked into the hotel around 7 pm. Everything was going great until I sent out an email to my family saying that. Right after that I started getting ready for bed and opened a closet with a motion-activated light. As soon as it went on all the electricity went out. I had to call housekeeping, who came to look at it, and they had to call the electricians. After about 15 minutes they figured out that it was going to take a while to fix so they turned on the AC breaker and had to leave all the others off. This all happened around 9 pm - there was 1 housekeeper and 2 electricians in the room and Chris was able to sleep through it all :)

Here's the view from our room:






As you can see we're in a busy area of Beijing - right down the street from Tiananmen square I believe. The first thing we noticed when we got in was the amount of exhaust fumes in the air. Tom, our guide, said that unless it rains it gets smoggy.