Beijing Day 1

I still cannot sleep. I will report to you that the insect that was keeping me awake was a beetle of some kind. As I was writing the last blog, it flew up onto the laptop screen. After a bit of a struggle with trying to get it off the screen, the beetle met an untimely (from its perspective) fate with my slippers. Paul's phone is still vibrating, though.

Day 1 we got up, made our way through the licorice door, and had breakfast. Following breakfast we decided to go out and explore Beijing for a while. We got to the subway and tried to order a refillable transit pass that Chunling had told us about. The subway attendant did not speak English. We thought we had finally explained what we wanted through the use of hand gestures. I handed the girl a 100 Yuan note, and she gave me a look of horror. In the end I wound up buying a one way far, which costs 2 Yuan, with the 100 Yuan note. Paul did the exact same thing. On our return trip we managed to figure out what the pass was that we were looking for, and bought one each using much smaller bills.

We then made our way to Tianamen Square and wandered around for the afternoon. It is getting late, I am finally sleepy, so I will have to stop writing now. As an apology for cutting my story short, I will leave you with a few photographs from day 1: