On the Ground Running

We arrived Thursday afternoon to Beijing Capital Airport--which is quite impressively expansive on the inside and out. We quickly learned that the Beijing Express train service is nearly complete for the Olympics; however, nearly is not complete. No worries, we took a shuttle bus to the Beijing (central) Train Station which, according to our map, is just a short walk to the hotel. Short is a matter of scale though, and we forgot to look at the scale of the map. More than two hours and three miles later, we had met many helpful locals who all assured us we were walking in the correct direction. The greatest difficulty was the last few-hundred yards. Our hotel is located in the middle of a hutong--old, expansive urban districts with narrow twisty paths. Even worse, all of the hutongs are being deconstructed and reconstructed at once. Streets now exist where they do not on any map and the navigable pathways are filled with mounds of rubble, dirt, sand, gravel, tiles, bricks, mud, open pits, and all the thousands of workers toiling away day and night to beat the start of the Olympic Games. What timing for a visit!

Included is a picture from Saturday which featured a visit to Tian'an Men Square, Mao Zedong's Mausoleum, and the Forbidden City. We've got to go--we're catching an overnight train to Datong soon.