Bangkok to Beijing

Beijing seems to me stuck between a real, functioning city, and a Disneyland theme park. The theme being Olympic city.
Streets are full but not overly congested as I had expected. Sidewalks and gutters were relatively clean. And most impressive of all was the blue sky for our first two days!

The flight from Bangkok was a mere six hours delayed. Thankfully the Bangkok airport is not a bad place to spend your morning. Sri Lanka air gave us a free meal in the airport thanks to Brooke's friendly and persuasive manner.
During our free meal I was "blessed" by a mouthfull of cappucino after cracking a joke at an untimely moment.
The flight itself was mostly pleasant. I got free whiskey, watched Iron Man, and was just far enough away from the woman hurling her breakfast that I could ignore her and enjoy my movie. Brooke was quick to discover that a cup of coffee hovering just below the nose could mostly drowned out the smell of stomach bile.

As bad as it sounds, the flight was actually fine. We arrived in Beijing only about 4 hours late (they hauled ass), got some help from a chinese woman who spoke perfect english, and caught a bus into town.

Once in the right neighborhood we figured it would be easy to ask anyone for directions to the hotel. We had the address written down. How hard could it be?

Three hours later, Brooke and I were about ready to bite eachothers heads off. The map we had was useless, the oh so eager to help locals had no idea where our hotel was, and almost no one we met spoke English!

After being confidetly placed on a local bus by some friendly twenty somethings, we found ourselves no where near our destination only to ultimately discover that we had literaly walked right past the alley to our Hotel about an hour earlier.

Argh!

We recovered, and spent the next day poking around the perimeter of the Olympic village. We couldn't get very close. They were preparing for the paralympic games and kept us a good half mile away from the birds nest and aquatic center. We took a couple of token photos and left.