getting there... with Ann

For those of you who don't know Ann is my travel buddy who speaks Chinese pretty well, it seems fluent to me, but according to her it's not outstanding. Whatevs... but anyway we FINALLY made it to Beijing... A lot has happened and I haven't had good consistent sleep in at least the past 72 hours so I'm having a hard time remembering everything so bear with me... While I was nervous about the length of the flight it was actually not too bad. I slept the vast majority of the time and while I was awake I just ate. My plan of not really sleeping the night before the flight worked pretty well. Ok, so the flight... The airline that I was on was a Korean based airline, so the food options were a choice between American and Korean. I decided with the Korean option, which was the best airline food I've ever had. It was bibimbop for a "heavy snack". Which is a beef, rice and vegetable dish, there also was kim chi on the side. For the breakfast option, I kind of punked out and decided not to go with the Korean option. I don't know but something about eating spicy octopus and rice in the morning just did not appeal to me. So I went with the "western option" which was an omelet, ham, croissant, and yogurt, which was not nearly as good as the Korean food and did not look as good as the spicy octopus ironically enough. After about 12 hours we FINALLY landed in Seoul (South Korea), I wished that I would have had more time to hang out in Seoul or at least actually leave the airport. However, we had 4 hours to burn so my travel buddy and I made the best of it. We stopped and grabbed a quick bite to eat at some cafe, where we at breakfast at a cafe, where we dined on spicy seafood ramen... Which is exactly what it sounds like, ramen noodles, with muscles, squid, octopus, shrimp, mushrooms in a spicy broth. When ordering this, i forgot that I don't really like seafood, but I made it work (by making it work I mean I gave lots of the seafood to Ann). After breakfast we ventured over to a little Korean cultural center place, where they had crafts and we made a little jewelry type bag. A funny story about that was that the Korean lady at the crafts placed mentioned that GW Bush was going to be coming through the airport, I mentioned to her how cool it would be if he stopped at her crafts place. She then mentioned that she wouldn't like that because she did not like Bush... Which I thought was interesting and I'll leave it at that, just for the record I love President Bush and he is coming here on Friday so please don't post anything negative about him because i am not trying to get kicked out of the country. We got on the plane again for the 2 hour flight to Beijing and AGAIN they fed us, a beef and rice dish, which was amazing for a two hour flight, also all the flight attendants stood in the aisle and bowed before the flight. Oh yeah another notable was that all the silverware was metal, which was cool. We finally arrived in Beijing and that's when the fun started... (i'll post pictures later)

Did you know... That despite a population of over a billion, China has only about 200 family names