Well, I’m out of the apartment, into a hotel in Dameisha (view from the hotel room shown, what a beautiful day) and went to Shenzhen airport at noon for the 3 hr plane trip to Beijing. A fellow project team member lives in Beijing and we shared a taxi and sat next to each other on the plane. That’s an Air China plane, like the one we took, and the Terminal 3 building at Beijing Capital Airport with the skylight windows looking like dragon scales. (The airplane window is scratched, not my camera lens!). That’s my colleague’s handwritten instructions with my hotel name for the taxi driver. Let me just note that watching someone write Chinese characters is like watching a magic trick unfold in front of one’s very eyes. : )
The next few pictures all show the sun setting in a cloudless sky, coloring it into beautiful shades of pink and orange. The outskirts of Beijing actually reminded me a lot of the winter sunsets we had in South Africa where I grew up! (A town called Vereeniging, an hour’s drive from Johannesburg). There are 5 ring roads (freeways) around the city and the hotel (my Google Latitude location in the picture) is toward the east of the Forbidden City, which is at the center of Beijing.
