Ni Hao Beijing!

When working to hard gets us down, sometimes we have to get out and travel a little bit. This time we decided on Beijing. We didn't plan much except for some shopping and we'd been referred to someone who could frame pictures for us, but other than that had done little more than book a room and start watching the flight loads. As the day to leave drew closer we suddenly realized the flight we wanted from SFO was really full. However the flight out of Washington (IAD) was nice and empty. All we had to do was get ourselves there by Friday morning. The red eye on our favorite airline was full, so we once again leaned on our friends over at Jetblue. Flying standby over there gets you a ticket right away, so as soon as we got our bags checked the rest of the day was pretty stress free. We arrived at IAD nice and early, so I rechecked our bag on Airline number one wandered back through security and we grabbed a quiet space in the terminal to get a nap. After nap time W's parents wandered through on their way to Frankfurt and hung out with us while we waited to be called for our Beijing flight. The also dropped me off a very nice birthday present. We got awesome business class seats, drank lots of wine and got to check out the movie Hot Rod, got a little sleep, and finally looked at a few of the guidebooks to figure out what we should do. We got to Beijing around 3:30 local time and met up with Wendy's friend Betty who flew in on the SFO flight. (she had to settle for coach) Then it was off to the hotel. The cab ride is already sort of long, but our cab driver decided we should take the scenic route and drove us around a bit more in an effort to run up the meter. It was actually pretty cool because we got to see the birds nest and the cube, so we didn't have to make a special trip out to see them later. Once we got to the hotel we met up with past travel buddy Dave, changed and went to the executive level happy hour. They brought us prepared snacks and you could pour your own drink, so we had to guard against getting too relaxed before even heading out for dinner. We had the concierge refer us to a place to eat some Peking duck. They sent us over to Quanjude, where we had to wait a while, but it was definitely worth it. To pass the time we sampled a bottle of a fortified rice wine that was powerful enough to knock you off of your feet. The duck comes out to your table whole, and some one comes out introduces the chef who will prepare it, and it is expertly sliced while you watch. It reminded me a lot of house of prime rib, except that it was about 1/10th the price. We crashed pretty hard ready for a busy day on Sunday.