We landed and to my surprise, the airport walk way is huge but ... kind of vacant like when KLIA first opened, know what I mean? Like they can handle a lot more load ... also the decorations are again quite ... lacking ... giving it a rush job feel
Anyway immigration and customs were great and we exited to be met by our liaison who had us in a van and that's when the fun started. The city at 1:00am was full of polluted smog! And then as we exited the airport, our van was struggling to even go beyond 30km per hour until we asked the guy if there is a problem. His only answer is that the past few days flood had gotten into his fuel ... then he pressed down accelerator and the engine roared and after several minutes, we were on our way ... only to be met by a massive jam! Yes at that time of night! Apparently somewhere further down, there is roadworks
By the time we reach our hotel zone it was almost 2:00am. Our liaison booked for us a hotel in the train station so that later on, we can just board it without much hassle. However, to our shock, the entire station is shut down and in darkness, not even security around! And to make it worse, our driver has no idea how to reach the hotel. We drove around the station, up and down, in and out, 3 times and we could see the hotel but no idea how to find the turning there. In the end, we drove to a parking lot, and half-carried our luggage for several hundred meters to the hotel
But wait, it gets worse. Checking out our rooms and realizing they do not provide any form of food or drinks, we went down to the lobby where there are 2 vending machines. We inserted money, it ate the money ... and that's it. We tried again, same thing happened. When we talked to the receptionist, his answer was dead brilliant. The machine is placed by a vendor, not them. And that's it! Thank goodness the drinks machine worked.
The walls were paper thin and we can hear neighbours going to toilet, light switches being flipped, AC temp controls being selected
Anyway after a long agonizing night, we got ready to go at the appointed time ... and guess what? All of us were ready except ... you got it ... the DareMan. He was still going to shower and change and what not! So it was another 20 minutes of waiting for him
My first impression of Beijing? Nice but polluted yet not overly congested with people. The train station is indeed impressive. Huge, clean, bright and lots of eating shops. We had a nice morning meal where (and here I go again) the DareMan stuffed himself silly. We all ordered 1 noodle dish and it was gigantic. The DareMan ordered 1 sweet drink, 1 noodle dish, 1 tofu, 1 veg and 1 fish. And he asked us to try. I declined and everyone else took a wee bit but he just packed it all in!
The train was nice. My first in a bullet train. Modern and very comfortable. Within a few minutes of chit chat, the DareMan got up to go to the buffet cart. Instead of buying drinks, he again bought lots of sweetened drinks, nuts, local dried foods and even duck neck desserts! And of course, he tucked it all in!
This was like less than 2 hours after breakfast
When we reached Jenan West, a car was waiting to pick us up and go to the city. It was to be about 1 to 1.5 hours. To our surprise, it was a stopping time again for meals. Unbelievable. I thought we would just head down to the city of Dongping but hey this is China and I wanna experience all the culture and uniqueness that that entails right?
So, the lunch. Without going into too much detail, suffice to say that this is the second simplest meal in China after our breakfast. And as usual the DareMan tucked in heartily and even drank glasses of alcohol!
We had lots of different starters made from veg, very little meat and we ended with plate after plates of meat like dumplings (our shui kow). No rice or noodles which to me is odd as I thought we are in rice country. There must have been at least 12 to 20 dishes and the DareMan whacked it all especially the ending dumplings. They brought out more than 4 types and he ate every single one and more than one piece each. There goes the diet, right? Hehehehehe!
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