Day 8, Riding the Dragon

This morning we head back to the airport by way of Central. At the MTR station is a satellite location for the airport where we check our baggage and pick up our tickets before getting onto the express train. Once at the airport, we have a really good breakfast for about what a candy bar would cost at O'Hare. 

Good food continues on the Dragon Air flight. Remember when flying was fun? In China it still is. The complimentary in flight meal comes with a menu to let you know who catered it. Wine is included. Afterward there is tea and coffee and ice cream. Before we land, there's a noddle bowl snack. 

The Beijing airport greets us with display cases full of contraband. Knives, sure, but Spam? We find a bus heading to the right part of the city and get to wait for 40 minutes before it departs. We should have gotten two cabs to save ourselves a lot of time for a little extra expense. The bus leaves us at a large road where a line of people are trying to catch cabs. There are five of us and all the cabs appear to only seat four. One of the gentlemen helping people get cabs offers to get us a large enough one for a small fee, but what he gets is just a normal sized one that we all get stuffed into.

We check in at the Wangfujing Hilton, which offers really nice modern rooms with movable walls and a master panel that controls most lights in the suite and the curtains from next to the bed. The showers are about the size of our entire bathroom in Hong Kong and have a rainwater feature.

We head back out to Wangfujing, a shopping district with malls, small shops, bookstores, tea shops, and just about anything else you could possibly want. We walk down a street where vendors sell anything you could possibly want to eat on a stick:

Until we find a restaurant that does Peking duck, which we order with some other delicious food and some Chinese wine that comes in a lovely clay pot and tastes like industrial furniture stripper. The duck meat and skin are served separately on duck shaped plates and served with plum sauce, vegetables and pancakes to wrap the other ingredients in:

After eating entirely too much, we check out chop stick shops and souvenir places until things start to close down.