Brisbane to Malaysia to Beijing

Hi everyone

We’re finally here! First thing’s first. Rob, you’ve been taunting everybody at the store with you chocolates, so we have decided that if you’re not going to eat them, it’s time for the poor things to see the world, so they’re touring with us. That ought to teach you.

We arrived here at about 3:30 PM after a brief stopover in Kuala Lumpur. Incredibly, nothing went wrong, the flights were all on time, we found our way everywhere we needed to go, and everybody was happy! Hooray!

The Beijing Airport was awesome. We’ve been stressing for the last few weeks because they’re really strict about anybody who looks like they have the flu, so there’s a questionnaire to fill out on entry asking you all sorts of questions, and when you arrive they corral you through a few queues to hand in the questionnaire, and while they do that they are taking infra-red photos of you to see if you have a temperature. We didn’t so we’re free to infect the population…

Then queued up for the immigration which took 15 minutes (compared to 2 and a half hours in Heathrow a few years ago), and then to customs, which took even less time. We got a phone that works here too, send me an email if you want the number, but I don’t think you are able to send SMSs to it unfortunately, and it probably costs a fortune to call us here.

Um…I don’t think we really did anything interesting tonight. We’re staying with Kate & Lloyd in a really cool place on the North side of Beijing, so we went out for dinner at a place not too far from where they live, with the Peking University is and a few other unis, so it’s pretty full of young people from all over the world. It’s a really interesting place. We passed a few street vendors selling different types of salmonella, with police women buying from them, so Lloyd told me to take photos, and then after I got a very cold stare from them both, Lloyd let me know that it’s probably illegal to take photos of officials. Oh well.

So there you go. Tomorrow we’re going for a walk through the city of Beijing. Kate Lloyd are both working, so we’re taking the city on by ourselves…at least we are after we’ve reported ourselves to the police - they like to know where tourists are.

OK, that’s enough of that. Hope everybody’s well, I’ll talk to you all later.

---

Part of trip: China 2009

---