Tuesday March 15, 2016

Hey Beijing. Smog to see you.

Well, we got here. No one slept on the plane, partly due to excitement, partly due to the fact that we were all on a god-damned airplane for over 14 hours. The ability to sleep in coach seating remains the providence of the bodily numb and the perceptually drunk, and ins spite of the complimentary alcohol service I — and as far as I’m aware, the kids — sadly remained neither. But, as I’ve already indicated, we got to our destination, so there’s that going for us.

It was 4pm Beijing time when we landed, which was just about enough of that airplane nonsense anyway. We traversed immigration, baggage claim, and customs with little to no delay. The Chinese remain as efficiently bureaucratic as ever. I would say it comparatively makes US immigration appear chaotic, but then again, a birthday party of 5 year olds on Adderall®, Fun-Dip®, and Mountain Dew® is more systematic than our American INS system. [Insert Donald Trump Joke™ here.] (And yes, I’m going to continue to make Donald Trump Jokes™ as much as I can because I am almost literally as far away from that manifest idiot as I can possibly be right now which makes me as happy as I’ve been since America lost its collective mind and made him a presumptive Presidential front-runner. It’s a good time to take a vacation from the American political process. You people should straighten this nonsense out before we get back, OK? Great. Thanks.)

Post-processing we were met by our tour guide, a wonderfully natured Manchurian who calls himself Arthur. Dorothy immediately took to calling him “King Arthur”. He might just live to regret getting assigned to shepherding our family around Beijing for the next several days. Arthur seems like our type of guy however, and based on his encyclopedic knowledge of Nathan Hale quotes (I kid you not) we should get along just fine.

We arrived at the hotel through the stop-and-go Beijing traffic down to the precise minute that King Arthur told us it would take to get there from the airport. Is he that lucky or just that good? Only time will tell. Seven million private automobiles in a city of 24 million people (these are Arthur’s numbers, but I put religious faith in a man with such unparalleled knowledge of Nathan Hale’s canon of intellectual thought) creates quite a haze I can tell you. The air here is viscous and masks the sun creating a perpetual twilight. I see people walking down the street smoking and can only admire the obvious disdain for their own respiratory system.

The hotel is passable and they have a lobby bar which is pretty much the alpha and omega of my lodging requirements, though Dorothy seems to expect more (what smells?) After some jockeying of who was going to sleep where, everyone (save your intrepid author) went to sleep everywhere. I myself instead decided to test drive the aforementioned hotel bar which lived up to my lofty expectations of having the ability to serve me beer. I let the less stalwart members of the Congiusta family catch up on some much needed sleep as I caught up on some much needed beer consumption.

Later in the evening when I tried to rally the troops for a dinnertime excursion into the wilds of Beijing I was met with snores of dismissiveness as my only response so I decided to journey out on my own. I took a nice solo jaunt through downtown Beijing with no destination in mind and happened upon a lively outdoor market where people were watched and time was killed (making explicitly sure not to reverse the noun/verb pairings). The sights and smells were wonderful but eventually the jet lag caught up with even me so I returned to the hotel and the rest of my sleeping family to rest up for a busy day of hiking The Great Wall of China. The good news was that on my way back to the hotel I was propositioned not by one, but by two separate ladies of the evening wondering if I was “looking for a woman?” Needless to say I interpret these interactions to mean that I — as the saying goes — still got it.

Sleep walking through the Chinese capital…