China - Day 1

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Well that was a long flight, not the nicest plane or journey I've ever been on but it got me here in one peice safe and sound. However there were a few mishaps along the way with one person forgetting their passport and only realising when he got to the airport, it made my problem of sitting away from my friends on the second flight alot less important. Although I got this sorted by asking a german man if he would swap seats with me, which he did happily. No in flight real movies, but the food was good so that numbed the pain of sitting in economy on a packed plane.

Landing in China was pretty straight forward, picked up my baggage with no problems, I was certainly fearing for the welfare of it after it being in the hands of the baggage handlers for such a long period of time. Previous to this was the Visa acceptance stage, I've never done anything like this before so that was a new experience, the woman harldy looked at my passport just stamped it and waved me through. It seems that its a regular custom to let the foreign groups through the baggage searching areas without any hassle, only the chinese people were being put through the security scanners and bag xrays, weird but true in the current situation with security on planes and all that.

Outside the airport we hopped into a minibus in a convoy towards the hotel, this showed us the typical driving styles of the chinese public, there absolutely crazy weaving in and out of lanes no idicating and properly love using their horns. The bus was pretty shaky and a little bit unsafe but it seemed that we were in good hands and getting to the hotel after a 14 hours journey for close to £5 you can't really complain with that. The roads cut through all sorts of areas, my first impressions I've got to admit were pretty negative, not sure if that was because of the painful flight or the hassle beforehand with the staff from KLM but I was wondering what this city had to offer other than dusty side streets and plenty of rubbish waste.

The hotel is pretty sound, can't really complain about that front. The beds are a little bit hard but I can manage with that one. We got to our rooms, threw our bags in and went straight out for a walk around of the local area. From the surrounding streets it seemed like the area had no unique aspects or personality but this soon changed as we walked towards an area built pretty recently around a man made lake, there was loads of places to eat and drink this certainly changed my early opinions of the city, but there were still doubts.

We settled on walking back towards the hotel and ventured into an english style back packers restaurant and ordered some food, the spag bol was special, considering I'm in China. I would have liked to try using chop sticks but we were all tired and hungry and combatting the urge to go back to the hotel and sleep, this was so tempting after 38 hours being awake but I needed to stay awake until at least 10pm.

Heading home it was pretty hard keeping awake but taking in the sights that the streets had to offer was nice, a lot of the stuff being sold in the shops are aimed at the tourist market on offer but its mostly cheap tat, it didnt appeal to me. My hotel bed although uncomfy was amazing, I had trouble sleeping but eventually nodded off, it was certainly needed!

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