POST FROM MIKE (I have to laugh at how different our experiences are...LOL, Nancy)

Day 1: arrived at 3:15 pm local time (1:15 am California time). We flew United Airlines. Seats were larger than Air China, thank goodness. Flight was not full, however noone slept. Anna did great!

Met our guide Rocky. What a great guy. Funny, informative and very helpful.

He brought us from the airport to our hotel. After that, please forgive me, the details are fuzzy. We arrived at hotel quite delerious. No one slept on the plane. Not any reason in particular, we just didn't feel really tired.

So, we got to the hotel feeling really tired (it just hit us like a brick wall, as we could hear the beds calling our names). Rocky set us up, checked our room and told us where to find water from a store "just down the street, within walking distance." It may be walking distance for a fully-alert Chinese guy who blends in, but when you go into the "street" (concrete jungle) of Beijing as an average English-speaking white guy when you should be 6 hours into your REM sleep, things are a bit different.

Not being as alert as I sould have been, let me tell you what I did wrong:

1. I didn't take the card all Americans should take - the card that says "take me back to the Beijing garden Hotel, please". Rocky gave these to us. he should have stapled it to my forehead.

2. I wasn't really awake.

3. I forgot almost no one will be able to speak English outside the walls of the hotel.

4. I forgot to get a really good look at the outside of the hotel so I could easily recognize it when I needed to return to it's relative sanctuarial safety.

5. I forgot that, if I could even FIND one, I could read a street sign!

So, here's where the father instincts may have been a bit duller than they should have been... I thought, since it is so scary out there, I will bring one of my kids!

So I grabbed Aaron, and off we went.

Really, the main problem with navigating on foot was that it was difficult to differentiate the sidewalks from the streets, as automobile traffic and pedestrians often share the same territory. In the US, you can easily stand back and say, "This is a sidewalk! This is the street! I walk here, and cars go there!" Thank goodness for our driver/stuntman!

So, about half way down the block from our hotel, I heard a voice in my head asking me, "Do you know what your hotel even looks like?" The disappointing answer was, "no.", so we walked back quickly, made mental notes, and turned back into the city with a renewed yet misallocated confidence.

So, out on the streets, we met a Beijing street gang that was really nice. (I went down the wrong street... I think it was a street). I'm sure if the gang had an interpreter, they would have been more comfortable with verbal communication rather than just staring. They seemed nice though. LOL!

Well, we made it through. We got back to the hotel and paid $30 for 6 small bottles of water. The whole journey was a bust.

Here's the worst part. The room had complimentary water in it alread! We couldn't read it though, because we didn't want to turn on the lights so as not to wake up Anna. UGH!

Mike