Day 1
Most of us could not sleep the day before we left for China, either we had to pack or were just too excited to sleep. We hoped we would be able to catch some sleep on the plane. Our flight departed on Friday, May 27, at 10:20 am Air Canada. We were asked to meet at the check in counter at 8 am, but some of us arrived there at 5.30am. We all arrived and checked in but there was one issue with one of our members having a problem getting a visa to get into Canada. The teacher and she tried everything they could think of, but she ended up having to buy another plane ticket taking a different route than ours to China. The plane ride took close to 2 hours to get to Canada, and then from Canada it took 14 hours to get to our destination in China, most of us only got 2-3 hours of sleep on the plane. We arrived in Beijing around 4-5 pm, and we had Dousen as our tour guide. Beijing is the second largest Chinese city, the population is 23 million, and 9 million come and go.
My first impression of Beijing was the people were taller than I expected. I looked it up and northern Chinese are indeed generally taller since Song time because of the combination of epigenetic and diet. The ancestry of northern Chinese is mixture of Han, Turkic, Turko- Mongolian and Tungusic. The ancestry of South is a mixture of indigenous Malayo - Polynesian. As for diet, they eat wheat and rice. Milled wheat, the staple in North China, has higher protein content than milled rice which is a staple of the South.
The air quality in Beijing was not as bad as I was expecting, maybe because we were there in the spring.
There is lots of traffic and only certain cars could drive on a certain day. While we were on the bus to our hotel, we noticed most of the people were driving while using their phone. When crossing the street we had to be very careful because cars didn't really stop for stop lights. They sort of yielded through the road.
The hotel we stayed in was in the center of the city Jianguo Hotspring hotel. The hotel manager, Oliver, arranged Beijings most famous Peking duck dinner, the chef came out with a cart near the table and carved the duck into this beautiful duck plaid server with the pancake, green onion, cucumber and his ion sauce, it was delicious. Then we took a subway to Wangfujing, Beijing's most famous shopping street. Beijing has a very good and very safe subway system, and it very easy to get to most places. Wangfujing had so many snacks like meat on a stick, star fish, stinky tofu, etc. Samantha, Kim and I got to try scorpion on and stick, it was crunchy and we didn't get sick from it. The city has a modern feel as if we were walking in time square, NYC. There were many street food stands and stations for souvenirs. It was full of people. Women dressed up sophisticated for the city.