flight and first few hours in China

Yesterday night we arrived in Beijing and got out of the airport at about 7:30pm.  Our flight had been a long 12 hours but was as good as could be expected.  My chinese officemate had freaked me out about taking Air China by telling me that he thought the seats would be tiny, since they wouldn't be made for tall white boys like me.  He did add that the Chinese hostesses would all be nice looking.  That wasn't really much consolation.   In the end we were pleasantly surprised, because the seats on the flight were fine and had plenty of legroom.

We didn't do much last night since we were so exhausted.  We took a cab to our hostel and checked in.   On the way into the hostel I'd caught a whiff of a kebab vendor.   I have a thing for crappy street food -- Marisa always rolls her eyes at me when I insist on getting chili dogs when we see them in SF.   I really wanted to try one of the kebabs, so we bundled up (it is below 32 fahrenheit in beijing at night) and took a walk down a hutong, which is an old alleyway.  We ended up standing at the grilling stand so we could watch how other people ordered, copied them, and just handed money at the person so she could make change.  What I thought was a fried fish ended up being some kind of pork slice, but it was still tasty and had a spicy almost-jamaican-jerk flavor, and it was only about $0.50.

After that we went back t o the hotel and fell asleep almost immediately at 9pm.  Yay for jetlag.