Day 2

Day 2
After a good night’s sleep or is it a good day’s sleep? The Jiangou Garden Hotel has a nice breakfast buffet which we enjoyed. We then ventured out on our own for a walking tour of the local shopping. The weather is warm but bearable. We visited a couple of different shopping centers. Our main objective is finding bottled water, and we were successful. It was fun walking the malls and their food court type areas. We are looking forward to trying some of the local KFC’s, McDonalds, and Starbucks. After a few hours we ventured back to our hotel, which has a nice Japanese restaurant, for lunch. After a short rest back in our room we were off to our massage appointments, which were a relaxing 2 hours for Crystal and a new experience for me. I feel all oily now. Anyway Dinner was nice. We had a small but tasty meal at a Chinese restaurant here in the hotel. Tomorrow we are off on guided tours of the Beijing, The Forbidden City, The Summer Palace, and a Chinese acrobatic show. - Jim
Hi everyone,
It’s Crystal – The travel was fine yesterday but I was exhausted flying the last leg from Tokyo to Beijing. Normally, I can sleep the moment I am on the airplane but my neck was bothering me and I could never quite get the seat to adjust right so I read, watched 27 Dresses and people watched. We did not have issues with delays and everything went quite smoothly which is wonderful.
I am glad that we had today off to relax and hang out. I know that I would not of done very well today if we had to get up at 6am our time here to go site seeing.
I do not have much to add to Jim’s blog other than the weather was gorgeous today. It was in the mid 70’s and the humidity was relatively low for this part of the world so it made walking around quite bearable.
The massages were wonderful and it was fun to do something with Jim that he would not interested in doing in the United States. The young lady that gave Jim his massage kept yelling at him to relax. It was funny. I can’t wait to get a massage in Guangzhou as well especially after carrying Madeline around for about 5 minutes.
We had wonderful Chinese food for dinner in one of the restaurants in the hotel. It was very good. Very flavorful, yet not greasy.
The hotel is gorgeous and right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of downtown Beijing. The staff is excellent and they have provided us with wonderful service.
The pollution was not much of an issue today but that is only addressing the issue based on observations around our hotel. Our escort that met us at the airport from Lotus Travel explained how hard China has worked on the pollution and other issues for the Olympics in August.
Signing off for now…..