This post will continue with the completion of our flight to Beijing, starting with our arrival. We will not technically have a post for September 20, 2024. That day was spent traveling on the long flights to Beijing, which were a total of 26 hours in duration, including layovers.
We headed into the terminal from our Korean Airlines flight, which was about 20 minutes late arriving.
We had a long walk to get to the immigration area for the gate. Along the way, we saw about 20 machines for fingerprinting, which was apparently a requirement for entering China. Everyone was stopping, or so it seemed, so we stopped also and read the instructions. We needed to scan our our passports, then the machine gave instructions to place your four left-hand fingers, no thumb, onto the glass screen, and it showed an image of the fingerprints being read, then the same procedure with the right hand, then both thumbs together and then it was finished. The first machine did not work correctly, and apparently, that happened on several other machines near us, people were moving to other machines after the first one failed.
We had to move to another machine and went to a machine where we saw someone complete the process. I went first and finished, but the machine was supposed to print out a completion receipt, but it did not. Then Stephanie tried a couple of different machines, including the one I used and could not get past the left-hand prints, it just was not reading them successfully. We asked a person at the machines, and of course, he spoke no English. We initially tried to ask about my receipt, and he said it was not necessary. Then we asked about Stephanie’s problem and he watched as she tried it once more. He then said through a translation app that the entire process was not necessary, and we were confused. there was another lady trying and she was also having trouble, but she could speak Chinese and English, and told us that he had also told her this whole process was not necessary. We were a little confused but took his word and headed onward to the immigration desk. It was a frustrating experience and Stephanie had gotten a little upset she was having troubles after I had successfully done it.
We were directed to the line for “foreigners” for immigration, and it was quite long but was moving pretty well. There were several groups of young men in line and they were all wearing some type of flag pins. the flag looked similar to the China flag but was apparently not since they were in the foreigner line with us, not the Chinese National line.
They were all pulled aside as a group for some reason, even though some were trying to go through the normal processing, even at the immigration officer’s desk. We did not know what they were representing, but they were getting some special instructions, and that meant they were all removed from the line, speeding it up for us.
We finally made it to the yellow line to wait in the next officer, we were in two different lines side by side. We handed over our passports, with the Visa inside, and also our arrival card. They did the same fingerprinting as we had tried to do earlier at the counter. I guess the other machines were there to help speed up the immigration processing. It was odd but I had to do my fingerprints again, but not the thumbs, so maybe the other set of prints finally uploaded to the officer’s machine. I got a stamp on my passport and I was on my way. Stephanie did all of the prints, including her thumbs, so I guess my prints did eventually show up from the earlier machine input. I guess if I had gotten a receipt from the machine, I could have given that to the officer and it would have been known before I started again. It did not matter now, we were done.
We headed to baggage claim for our luggage and found the carousel for our flight. Of course, by now our baggage was already on the rotating belt and we found it pretty quickly. With our upgraded seats, we had priority luggage tags, but that does not provide much when you have to take all of that time to go through immigration.
From baggage claim, we headed to customs and went to the “Nothing to Declare” line. We had to have all of our baggage scanned, including my camera backpack. There was no issue so we collected our bags and headed out of the customs area.
We headed to the exit into the terminal and there was a large crowd gathered outside of the barriers. Initially, we saw a lot of people with signs with names on them and thought these were people waiting for passengers for their airport transfers to the city. Maybe some were, but the crowd was really large. Then we saw a group of about twenty men lined up in two rows, all wearing black suits. There must have been some dignitaries arriving, and it probably had something to do with all of the men we saw with the flag pens in the immigration line. It was like we were walking on the red carpet for the Emmys. We exited the barricaded area and looked for an ATM in the terminal.
We found one off to the side and headed there for some Chinese Yuan. I had read that all of the ATM machine had a selection for English, and we saw a selection that had the word “English” on it, but nothing changed on the ATM screen after we pressed it, everything was still in Chinese. We tried to go forward with withdrawing some cash but that was not going to work without some translation, we only got as far as entering the PIN. By the time we found the translate app on Stephanie’s Phone, the timer had terminated our transaction, so we had to try again. It was better this time, we could see the translated wording with the phone app, and were finally able to withdraw the money. It was a tedious process, and I was sweating, we needed cash in case we had to pay for our taxi ride to the hotel in cash if our Alipay App did not work. We would not know if it worked until the taxi ride was over and we paid, so we needed a backup. Alipay is a China App that is used for almost every kind of payment here, no one really accepts credit cards, only cash and Alipay.
With our 1000 Yuan in hand, we headed outside of the terminal to the taxi area. There was no line and we were directed to a taxi right off. Unfortunately, this taxi driver had a lot of stuff in his trunk, so we could only get one large suitcase and the carry-on in the trunk, the driver placed the other suitcase in the passenger seat up front.
We had printed the name and address of the hotel in English, Mandarin and Simplified Chinese before we left home and gave it to the driver. There was some issue with him understanding the three choices, the driver and then another attendant kept asking us if we wanted to go to the middle choice they pointed to, which was the Simplified Chinese version. I guess the other two versions were foreign to them since they did not seem to understand the Mandarin version to see it said the same thing as the simplified version. Of course, to us, the symbols all looked the same on both Chinese versions. We said yes to the middle choice.
We got in and were glad to see he started the meter, sometimes that is an issue, especially for foreigners. Stephanie was also tracking our route on Google Maps just to ease our concern that we were indeed heading to our hotel. We headed off and were amazed at the traffic. It was heavy all the way from the airport into the city. There were a couple of minor accidents, but that was not really slowing down the drive, there were just a lot of cars for a Saturday morning. Drivers in China are a little crazy. There were a lot of abrupt lane changes on the drive, but since the traffic was heavy and going slowly, it was not really a safety concern.
It took about 45 minutes for us to get to the hotel, and we were able to successfully pay the driver with the Alipay, but not without some issues. We had thought we would pay by having the driver scan our Alipay code, but he wanted us to scan his code, so we had to figure that out, put in the amount of payment, use our PIN, and then it all worked, but not without some help from the bellmen at the hotel.
We headed into the hotel and went to the reception desk to check-in, hoping a room would be ready for us. Luckily, a room was available and we met a young lady at the desk and she was able to speak good English. We found out that she is from Madrid, and has been here in China for four months. Stephanie mentioned we are part of the Viking group that starts on September 24, and we were trying to figure out if we could continue to stay in the room we were getting today for the three nights before we are with Viking so we did not have to change rooms. She said she would take care of it so we could stay in our room, which was nice. We are assuming that the Viking rooms were basic rooms, but we do not know for sure, so we are either getting an advantage in room size with our king suite, getting the same quality as with Viking, or there is a possibility we are getting less quality since there are room categories better than ours on some higher floors that are “Club Access”. We will probably never know, but it will be nice not to have to pack everything up after our first three nights and move to a different room.
She accompanied us up to the room to make sure everything was correct and to tell us some information and answer any questions. The bellboy brought up our luggage at the same time. I had asked at the desk about getting some change for tips, but she said tipping is not part of the culture here and is not expected, and we did get some smaller bills just to have for a taxi ride, they do not like large bills, and the 100.00 bills we had gotten from the ATM are considered large.
The room was nice, it was quite roomy and had a great view out over the city. We are on the 9th floor, about halfway up in the building height. It was a little warm in the room, it has a large glass window across the entire room and we are on a curved corner. Plus, the curtains were open to the afternoon sun and it was obviously heating up the room.
We asked about bottled water and found out that is provided by the hotel in unlimited quantity. There were already some bottles in the room, but we went ahead and requested more. Stephanie asked about the sodas in the refrigerator, specifically if they had Diet Coke, but they only have Pepsi products. The receptionist was going to send some more Diet Pepsi’s up to the room.
We found out that her name was Itzisa, and the “t” is silent in pronunciation.
After she left, we decided to go ahead and unpack most of our clothes and hang up the nicer shirts and pants, and then put everything else in the closet and drawers. We will be for six nights total, so we did not want the clothes to get any more wrinkled than they already were.
After that was finished, we took long-awaited showers to help to refresh us and wash off the 34 hours of travel, and they felt great. The shower is large and has a nice rain shower head, as well as a handheld shower head. We set up bottles of water next to our toothbrushes to help remind us to use the bottled water when we brushed our teeth.
We relaxed a bit before we decided to go down to the front desk and ask about a tour for tomorrow. The one we had set up was getting canceled because there were not enough people signed up, and they would not run the tour for just the two of us.
We asked Itzisa about tours to go to the sights we wanted to see tomorrow, and she said we could easily do them on our own, just taking the taxi or Didi ride share (China Uber). We decided to go with that plan and not schedule a paid tour. Now we needed something to do for this afternoon. There was a shopping area that was accessible by the Metro. The nearest Metro Station was supposed to be about a 10-15 minute walk from the hotel to the station, and Itzisa circled the name of the station on a map of Beijing, as well as the stop we needed to get off on to go to the shopping area. I had to go upstairs to get my camera and backpack, and Stephanie got walking directions to the Metro Station while I was gone, or so I thought..
We headed out after I returned. Unfortunately, Stephanie got confused about the walking directions and we initially headed in the wrong direction, and things went downhill from there. Google Maps does not work well in China, most Google apps are banned, so we pulled out my phone and opened Maps.Me, an app similar to Google Maps for directions.
We used the Metro Station name in a search and found it, it was quite a few blocks away, and our legs were already tired from all of the airport walking we had done. We decided to go ahead and walk to the Metro Station, and when we got there, it did not fit the description she had given us, but it was the same name as was circled on the map. There were supposed to be ticket machines, but we did not see any after going through security to enter the station. Immediately inside were turnstiles, and on the right was a manned ticket office. It was difficult to tell the ticket agent where we wanted to go, he spoke no English, so we used the translate app. We were not sure how to use the Alipay to pay, there was a QG code, but the was also some tyro if scanner. He was getting irritated, so we just used cash. I initially handed him a 100.00 yuan bill, but that was apparently too large, and he showed us a 10.00 bill, so we gave him a smaller 10.00 bill and he gave us 4.00 in change and our two tickets.
They were plastic cards that we scanned to enter. It was a really long walk down a lot of stairs and tunnels to the actual Line 1 platform. It almost seemed like we had already walked halfway there before we arrived at the platform. It was not terribly crowded on the platform, and we only had to wait a couple of minutes before the next train arrived. It was totally packed with people. A few left the train and we shoved our way into the door, barely getting in before they closed.
We needed to ride to the fourth stop from here, and at each stop, a few people departed and more tried to push their way onto the train. We could not get very far off to the side from the doorway, there was nowhere to go inside. This happened at all of the stops, and we finally made it to the fourth stop and pushed our way off the train. Luckily, a couple between us and the door was also getting off, so that made it easier.
Now we had to figure out which exit we needed to take from the station to go to our destination, the shopping area. That was an impossible task, there were about four different exits, and we could not figure out which one might get us closest to the area we were heading to, so we just picked on and went up some stairs to the street level. We could see a lot of people off in the distance in what appeared to be a shopping area, so we headed that way. Of course, we passed no less than two other Metro Station Entrance/Exits on the walk there, so obviously, we had picked the wrong exit.
We walked up the busy street, and there were a lot of stores in this area. However, my legs were done in from all of the walking we had done so far, actually it was my hip. I have been fighting some bursitis in my right hip since before our Iceland trip, and it was getting really sore after all of the walking today. I had seen an ortho doctor after returning from Iceland, and received a cortisone injection, but it was still getting sore, and we had already walked a lot today since we had arrived on our flight in Seoul, and then in the Beijing Airport, plus the extra walking to the Metro Station. In the end, we should have called a taxi or Didi ride to get here, saving all of the walking to and from the Metro stations, and then the additional walking to get to the platform inside the starting station.
Since this was a pedestrian-only area, we needed to walk to a side street outside that area so we could use the Alipay App to call a Didi ride. We headed down one road, and then came to a busy intersection and there was a large hotel there, and we actually saw a taxi dropping off people at the hotel. We tried to get to the taxi before he left, but he was gone before we could get there. We opened the Didi Ride part of the Alipay App and called a taxi with that.
Our taxi was several minutes away, and there was a lot of traffic. The app is just like Uber, it tracked the taxi’s progress getting to us and gave us the driver’s name and the license plate number of the taxi itself.
We headed across the street to the hotel entrance and waited. We thought the taxi was coming from one direction, but it arrived from the opposite direction and stopped where we had been when we completed the Didi request. I guess it shows the driver exactly where the request comes from on their map.
We flagged him down and got in and off we went. When you use the app to call a taxi, they need to enter the last two digits of the requesting phone number’s last four. This driver just handed his phone to us and Stephanie put in the last two numbers of her phone number and it registered that we had prepaid the fare and verified we were the requestors.
It took a while to get back to the hotel we had traveled quite a distance on the Metro, and of course, there was the ever-constant traffic. We arrived and got a receipt from the taxi driver and exited.
We dropped off all of our gear at the room. We needed to figure out something to eat for dinner tonight, and we also wanted to check out the bar on Floor 2. There was a restaurant next to the bar that we passed and we were going to check out their menu after getting a beer at the bar.
We were the only ones there in the bar, and so we just sat at the bar itself. We ordered two Chinese beers and sat down to relax. The beers were good, and they served us some beer nuts that were spicy, not sweet, and some kind of baked rolled dough pieces, sort of a really thin dough, rolled into many layers and then either fried or baked. They were good.
We got a menu from the restaurant and looked through it. They had a lot of selections and even had some fresh seafood you picked out yourself from a tank. It was quite pricy, but to be expected from a Ritz-Carlton. We could not find anything that we thought would be good, and worth the high prices. We were too hungry to enjoy a fancy dinner, and probably not dressed for it either. We were not sure what to do, but we thought there was another restaurant downstairs where breakfast is served, so we would go there after we finished the second beer that we had ordered while looking at the menu. We never did see anyone go to that restaurant near the bar, but it was behind us, so we may have missed people going there. There had to be somewhere people in the hotel were eating, we just needed to find it.
We went down to the lobby and saw where everyone was eating, it was in the same area where breakfast is served. It was a large buffet set up, and we walked through to look at all of the different food stations. There was fresh seafood and sushi, as well as salads and fruits, there were three different hot serving areas with quite a selection of items, and it was packed with people.
We asked about the price and it was the equivalent of around $50.00 per person, a little steep, but better than the upstairs restaurant pricing, and we could certainly find something we liked. We gave the hostess our room card to charge the dinner to the room, and found a table to sit at.
The food was good, some of it better than others, the sushi and boiled shrimp were good, but I am not a fan of removing heads from already cooked shrimp, there is a lot of green stuff in the head and it was oozing out as I removed the heads. It is fine to eat, just not appealing. They had a sliced beef that was served fresh on a plate with vegetables, cut to order. It seemed a little like a prime rib, and was good. There were several Chinese dishes and we sampled a few.
Most everything was good, but it was not really warm, the Achilles heel of a buffet. We started up a conversation with the head Maître D’, his name was Chris and he could speak really good English. He had stayed in the US for several years, attending culinary school. We told him we were with the Viking group and he told us that there had already been a couple of other Viking groups who had stayed at the hotel before our trip.
When we were done with dinner, Chris went to get our dinner receipt and also gave us a small gift in a bag. He also gave us the Viking Discount, which was a few dollars off, again a nice gesture.
We headed back up the room, we were done for the night. It was only about 8:30 PM, but seemed much later. We opened the gift that Chris had gave us, it was a nice set of chopsticks inside a gift box, with chopstick table rests to set them on.
We called it a night shortly afterward. We were not getting up early tomorrow since we were on our own for touring.
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