Arrival

Pudong Airport Departure Lounge
Originally uploaded by Keith Marshall.

Well, I'm in China! So far my experience has been mostly of Shanghai's Pudong Airpot, where we had to wait for several hours for a connecting flight into Beijing. It's an amazing modern building and these picture don't really show the scale of the thing - it's absolutely huge. I'm suffering severely from lack of sleep - yesterday was nearly 30 hours without sleep and my body clock decided it was a good idea to wake up at 3am this morning so I'm not doing too well - hopefully I'll adjust soon!

Rather annoyingly the plane from London flew right over Beijing, but it was another 8 hours before we actually arrived there. We flew over Mongolia and Inner Mongolia (the northern part of China) before that, which gave some amazing views over the desert and mountains of that region. Very brown, bare and bleak.

As you can tell I have got internet access - it claims that it's free but I'm not entirely sure - might be costing me a fortune. I'll find out when we check out on Wednesday to fly to Xi'an. It's currently 7am in Beijing, and I'm about to go down to find out what the Tiantan Hotel (very nice!) has for breakfast.