First day in Beijing.

I've arrived, finally!

The flight itself was pretty chilled, apart from crazy lady next to me. I got bumped up to premium economy (YAY more legroom), so had the choice between beef curry 😒 or some fish and vegetables 😊. Shockingly, I went for the fish, but apparently so had the rest of the cabin so I got the last dish. The woman next to me was definitely unamused by the situation, and told the air hostess that she was allergic to beef. The air hostess pointed out that if that was the case she should have mentioned it when she was booking her flight, but there is a chicken salad from economy if she would like )that? Crazy lady was clearly unimpressed by this result, so she rounded on me and tells the air hostess that I didn't even pay for premium economy so shouldn't I have the salad. At this point the hostess lost all patience with Crazy and basically tells her it's salad or nothing. Crazy lady now becomes crazy, grumpy lady, and I ate my fish as quickly as possible in case she nicked it!

When we finally landed Beijing, I power walked with serious speed through immigration, and picked up my bags. Helen (the mum) spotted me and called me over, after some awkward hugging (on my part attempted European style cheek kissing) we went to the car. The ride home definitely gave me the adrenaline rush I needed to wake me up! It was without a doubt one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, I would rather hold a tarantula than do that again. It appears that rules of the road are negligible at best, and realistically non-existent. Everyone basically engages in a massive game of chicken, whether you have the balls to pull into that lane, drive in the hard shoulder, or cut up a lorry. When your driver apparently has a lot of balls and is weaving between cars it is just petrifying. 

Anyway, we survived the motorway drive of death and reached the apartment complex. It's all very clean with guards and gates and personal parking spaces. We're on the 22nd floor so there are great views.

The view from my room. Unsurprisingly no stars. 

The grandfather was the only one home when we got back, he'd made me this massive bowl of noodles - the traditional dish for someone who has just completed a long journey - with some bean sauce, cold beef, eggs, carrots, some green vegetable, hazelnuts, and tofu. There was genuinely enough for about 4 people, and even though it was super tasty I didn't even manage to eat a real person portion... He has a real thing about me eating though, every time I come back into the living room he thrusts more food into my hands. So if I come back fat it's not my fault, I'm just being polite. He even took me into the kitchen, showed me his posters of basically every food under the sun, and we played the 'yes eat, no eat' game. It's super fun!

Leo, the son, came back from kindergarten about 5:00. He is super cute, but his English isn't as good as I imagined. He knows lots of words, but not how to put them together. So he just says 'hotel' or 'butter'. 

We then went to the supermarket and once again they were very concerned about food for me, which is very sweet, but I do love Chinese food so they needn't worry so much. Ironically they took me to McDonald's for dinner, which wasn't really what I envisaged when I started this trip, but hey ho. When we got back the dad was home, so we watched some World Cup badminton. I don't know if its the jet lag messing with my brain but it was bizarrely engrossing.

The best bit about today though is that even when it's 37*C outside (like today), my room is a cool 20, because I have air conditioning!!!!!