another happy landing

it is a hard feeling to describe being thrown in this after a day of travel like that one, your backpacking through san fran. after a little sleep, to get on a train to take you to the airport, where you wait and then you are tightly placed on a plane for 13 hours, to land with your sinuses and ears in a complete wreck, cant here or speak, get on another short train, meet a friend you have not seen for some time, hop in a cab heading into downtown beijing and lo and behold.....the nights just getting started.....the exhaustion is overcome by the thrill of being here, it is as crazy as you would imagine, very energetic, we were just taking it all in and learning new things every second, we wandered the old neighborhoods of beijing, intertwining with bikes and motorcycles and people everywhere, with city sounds and the constant music of 1000s of tonal chinese voices that don't make any sense at all, we went to a 4 story restaurant that looked like you would expect, very ornate chinese decour with all the neon buzzing and the food was really great, we tried lots of different tapas style dishes and had 4 beers apiece (side note...important one....the beers are a standard 220z here and they are about 50 cents.....lord help us) we came back to chris' place and i fell straight to sleep only to wake up for the day at three in the morning, jet lagged as hell, taste of pollution in my mouth, too excited to sleep anyway, we are going to try to see some stuff today if they will ever wake up, may just head back to the 50 cent giant beer eastern paradise in the sky