Heading for Beijing

            Before leaving for Beijing, I had a bit of time to wander around Hong Kong. I went outside of the mall where we were docked and found them constructing Toy Story Land for Christmas!!!! It was AWESOME! Huge plastic figures of Woody and the gang – pretty cool! I couldn’t find a nice gift shop outside of the mall so I decided to walk around in the mall, hoping I would find something decently priced. OMG that ENTIRE mall was ritzy, crazy high-priced stores – and it was an enormous mall!!! HUGE – three stories in some parts and a large ‘L’ shape! I think it is one of the biggest in the world. I just couldn’t believe that the entire thing was high-priced stuff – a pocket mirror was $12!! I could get that at the dollar store! So I obviously didn’t buy anything. They did have benches that looked like bent over chocolate bunnies that you eat for Easter and candy-shaped seats. Also, they had a fine dining Pizza hut – that’s an oxymoron but it’s true. You literally sit down in a fancy restaurant and eat pizza hut. Oh, and KFC seems to be more popular than McDonalds, which is amazing because I would never have guessed that. For most of Asia, if there was a KFC, a McDonalds would be nearby. In fact, they referred to them together as if they were one unit, which is also weird.

            We went to the airport, where the security was surprisingly stricter than India, who was supposed to have the strictest airport security that we would encounter. The plane that we went on was the largest I’d ever been on, with two rows on either end of four middle seats. The best part was that each seat had a touch screen on the back of the headrest in front of it and you could watch a movie for free (well…’free’). So, I watched Green Lantern because I hadn’t seen it yet – I was very happy.

            We arrived in Beijing and went to a legit peking duck restaurant – the best in Beijing. The food was excellent, then they brought out the duck. There is a special, traditional way to prepare the duck. After baking it in a way that makes the skin crispy and the inside juicy, they have to cut it into a certain number of strips (38?), which takes exceptional skill. Then we went to our hotel, which was very nice and had extremely small doors (only a little taller than me).