Introduction to Beijing

I am going to try and do this as fast as humanly possible. I am behind almost 2 weeks, and there is no way I can fit everything in, so the following blogs will be pics galore and very little text.

Let's start with the new Terminal 3 at Beijing international airport.



It looks great but can I just say that the Chinese are experts at building bottlenecks into large spaces. What I mean by that is - look at all that space! You would think that you could fit thousands of people in there right? WRONG. The squishy part begins when these thousands of people all have to cram into ONE ELEVATOR. And again when you get to the teriminal cable trains, and there is only ONE TRAIN every 10mins and each train holds like 20 people.

I can only imagine what is going to happen when all the athletes come in. Yes, bottleneck experts indeed. How extremely crafty...

This is the hotel that I have been staying in for the last 2 weeks. It is a serviced apartment for people who stay in Beijing for business for long periods of time. We have a contract with them so its where everyone in the company stays when they're in Beijng. The location is excellent (in Wangfujing) and the place is not too bad.





Here we are having drinks at the Penninsula next door, where some of our US suppliers were staying.

The woman on the right is WangLing, who heads the project on the Beijing side. But we are still managing her. Kinda sad, cos shes like 10 years older than both me and Juan. Anyway, shes pretending to listen in on the coversation here but she cant speak a word of English LOL...

I met up with some Beijing friends on Day One, who I havent seen again since. Jeff & fiance:

Me and Jo:

We went to a Bavarian restaurant called Morels - not bad, but then Nick (my boss) took us to this pizza place called Kro's Nest which was better:

They had massive pizzas! This is one slice from a medium pizza, which was already as big as the table. Good thing we didnt get the Large/Family size: