It’s been a hectic few days, and I haven’t been good at getting things to work here in Beijing, but here’s my first update of our Asia trip.
The Itinerary
In short, Mary and I are spending about 7 weeks in Asia. We start in Beijing, fly to Guilin, cruise to Yangshuo, then fly to Kunming. After that we travel to Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. I’m going to try to keep up this blog as a journal of the trip as best I can. Hope you enjoy it!
Flying to China
From our regional airport in Eastern North Carolina we flew to Atlanta, Georgia, where we picked up a direct flight to Seoul, Korea and switched planes for Beijing. We boarded our first flight a few minutes before 6:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, November 4, and landed in Beijing Saturday, November 5, at 8:20 PM local time. Total travel time, including layovers, about 26 1/2 hours.
Security was easy to get through; the Atlanta Priority Lounge was comfortable, but totally colorless.
The food we were served on the trans-Pacific flight was fun:
The server comes with a tray containing a number of bowls. One has soup; two tiny ones have pickled, savory vegetables (think kimchee). One large one has ingredients in the bottom: ground beef, mushrooms, sprouts, peanuts, sautéed spinach. A covered one has rice. You add the rice to the big bowl, top it off with some hot Korean chili paste and a squeeze of sesame oil, and mix it all up. Very good eating!
The Korean Air lounge in Seoul was hot, muggy, crowded, noisy. Avoid it if you can. But the terminal is not all bad. It houses a Korean arts-and-crafts store/exhibit, where they were giving demonstrations of one of the traditional crafts–making paper boxes. But they also exhibited two traditional printing plates.
The wood cut has handles–curious. And since it just has writing, I suppose it was meant just for printing on paper:
The other is actually a ceramic tile, which I’ve never seen used this way before. My guess it is used to decorate fabric, and for that it would make sense, since it would be impervious to water:
Next: Wandering through Beijing