Epic first day in Beijing

Wow. China blocks Facebook AND Blogs? Total dealbreaker. Thank god for proxies, but this is really annoying!

First off, never fly Air China. If it weren't for the fact that I was lucky and slept a good 8 hours on that flight, it would have been an incredibly miserable flight. No personal TV/multimedia system (ie no hours of video mahjong play for me), and the food was not only horrendous (even beyond the crappy quality you'd expect from airplane food), but they also skimped so much on the portions (again, even beyond the two spoonfuls of rice you'd come to expect on ordinary airplane food). Not cool.

But man, what an epic/productive/AWESOME day. I land at around 4 in the morning in Beijing and book it immediately to the hostel...which is a quaint converted hutong near YongHeGong (Lama temple). I meet and have breakfast with Shane, my new roommate, and then immediately go apartment hunting with the agent that we've been talking to. Yes, that's right, on my first day in town and after being massively jetlagged, I have to deal with apartment hunting in Chinese, haha. So we look in the Sihui district and find some ridiculously gorgeous apartments at a reasonable price (but are in the middle of nowhere). Finally, by night we find this pretty awesome recently-renovated apartment smack dab in the middle of Sanlitun. Its kind of ridiculous how great of a location it is...right between worker's stadium (Vix and Mix...and most importantly, Kro's Nest pizza) and the Sanlitun village (jiu ba jie--the famous bar street). So after negotiations/discussions for almost two hours...we secure the place and are moving in today!

Will post pictures of our sweet new place soon.