Beijing 101
After 15 hours of flying we landed in China, safe and sound, although we had skipped Sunday, March 11th entirely because of the International Date Line. Our first few hours in Beijing found us scratching our heads - not only did the first ATM eat our credit card, but we wandered around central Beijing looking for our hotel at 12:30 a.m. We found it, and just in time, we collapsed into bed with only 6 hours to sleep before we met our guide.
The next morning our guide was waiting for us in our hotel lobby - Kong Lin was our local contact for the day, showing us around Beijing and hitting some of the sights we knew we might have trouble getting to. Our first stop was breakfast in a very authentic Chinese-style cafe, where the soup was cream of wheat poridge and steamed dumplings that you could taste until lunch. Kong showed us how to access the subway and we were off for the Beijing zoo, the Peking University Campus, the Imperial Gardens, the Summer Palace, and the hutong neighborhoods in central Beijing. 
For lunch, Kong took us to a restaurant outside of Peking University where we ordered beef and pork dishes. However, when the food arrived, we realized that it was not part of the pig we were used to eating - we're not quite sure what it was, but tendons and cartilage were included! Pretty tough to eat, but if you chew hard enough, it breaks up and you can swallow it - Kong was laughing pretty hard at our attempts to swallow it! We stuck with plain rice for the rest of the meal.One thing that struck us the most was how pretty Beijing is - we were expecting Soviet-style construction and signs of communism everywhere, but were blown away by how many parks, trees, and beautiful buildings (both old and new) we saw.