14 hours later, we finally landed in China. We got to the hotel in the afternoonish time and got the day to ourselves. Athena and I decided to explore Beijing a little bit and just walked around. We noticed that so many people were definitely staring and taking pictures of us – between her blonde hat and my dark skin, I quickly realized that we don’t exactly blend in. One guy even asked to take a picture with us! (he offered us water after and was super nice!)
The thing I noticed right away is that the language barrier is going to make everything a little bit harder, whether it’s buying fruit or ordering dinner. When we went to dinner, I had to use the pictures on the menu to select what I wanted to eat and show the waiters because they didn’t understand English and I can’t speak Chinese. I asked for chicken fried rice and I expected it to be super common here because that’s very common back home, but that wasn’t an option. There were chicken dishes and egg fried rice, so when I asked for chicken fried rice, the waiter pointed at the kung pao chicken and the fried rice and I assumed she understood that I wanted the chicken in my fried rice, but little did I know that I just ordered king pao chicken AND fried rice, so I ended up ordering too much by accident.
That was pretty much all I did that day and it was nice because the jet lag is so real and I slept super early.
