Beijing

Arrived in Beijing Tuesday afternoon.  People are always curious how long the flight is from the U.S. to China and on my flight I discovered a good way to describe it: one can watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in addition to another movie.  Yes, the flight had all three movies on demand, which is a pretty brilliant idea.  It also had other movies and their sequels, e.g. the Mission Impossible movies and the Men in Black movies.  Such a good idea!

Started work yesterday, and will get a lot of opportunities to work on my Mandarin, which is great.  While people do speak English, since they discovered that I can speak Chinese they have been slipping into speaking Mandarin with me instead of relying on English to communicate.  Makes me feel so good about my hard work!  Still feel like I have a long way to go, but definitely encouraging that I am better than I think.