China Travel 2.0

Not having known what to expect we had ordered a limo to pick us up and take us to the hotel.  That was unnecessary, we could have taken a taxi, although there are apparently many scams at the airport.  The tour guide who took us to the great wall later said that legitimate cabs in Beijing could be easily identified by the character for capital 京 followed by B on the license plate.  I later verified this by looking at the license plates of many cabs.  They are cheap and quick and a good way to get around Beijing.  However, not many of the cab drivers speak English so we enlisted the help of the hotel concierge in issuing instructions in Chinese.  Beijing also has an extension to the airport of their subway line now under construction.

After about a 30 minute drive we arrived at our hotel, The Grand Hyatt Beijing.  This hotel deserves time spent on it alone.  I am not a connoisseur of five star hotels.  Those few I’ve been in before struck me as a waste of money so in America I prefer to stay in Sleep Inns or the like and not pay for grandiosity or amenities I’m not going to use.  However the service in this hotel was superior to most other service I’ve encountered  before.  The best of a number of examples occurred the day before we left.  I knew if I arrived in Korea with a load of laundry that Betsy was going to insist on doing it for me.  So that I wouldn’t arrive in Korea with any laundry to do I used the hotel laundry as the time for departure from Beijing grew near.  Some time after my laundry was delivered the doorbell to my room rang.  It was a young girl from the hotel laundry service.  She explained that they had found a button which they thought came from my shirt.  May she come in?  She looked at my shirt, found that a button was indeed missing, and that the button she had matched the rest of the set.  Having found that, she held up one finger for me to wait and went out into the corridor.  Fifteen seconds later she reappeared with a needle and thread and sewed the button back onto my shirt.  Wow!  By Thursday the hotel had both of us spoiled rotten.

In the basement of the hotel was a swimming pool about a half acre in size.  The lighting, the stars on the ceiling, and the general décor was such as to create the impression of night on a Polynesian island.  It included several hot tubs.  Cindy spent every minute that we didn’t commit to something else at the swimming pool.  When we left Cindy commented that China didn’t have to give her a visa to the country next time.  A visa to The Grand Hyatt Beijing would be sufficient.

The hotel was also centrally located from a tourist’s point of view.  The address is 1 East Chang An Avenue.  The division point between East Chang An Avenue and West Chang An Avenue, two blocks west of the hotel, is Tian’anmen Square,  the square which gained notoriety around the world in 1989 when a student protest movement was violently suppressed there.   During the time we were there it was more appropriate to its name, which roughly translates as The Gate of Heavenly Peace.  The square is on the south side of  Chang An Avenue.  On the north side is the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself which is the entrance to the Forbidden City, the area where the Emperor resided and which, during the days of the Empire, carried a death penalty for the unauthorized entrant.

The hotel also connected directly to Oriental Plaza, a semi-underground shopping mall which stretched at least half a block (I never did explore all of it.) to Wangfujing Street, just west of the hotel.  Oriental Plaza is a definitely upscale shopping mall.  Look for the latest fashions there but don’t look for bargains.  The same can be said for Wangfujing Street, part of which was closed to automobile traffic turning that part of the street into another shopping mall.  We had definitely selected Beijing’s high rent district for our stay there.  As you approached Wangfujing Street Oriental Plaza also had a direct connection to Beijing’s number one subway line so if need be you could get to the hotel from the subway station without being exposed to the weather.

We unpacked and ate dinner at the hotel’s main restaurant, where Cindy had trouble stopping the staff from refilling her water glass whenever it dropped below the ¾ level.  By the way, I can’t tell you whether Beijing’s tap water is potable because we took no chances and drank the bottled stuff.  Then we decided to walk down to Tian’anmen Square.  Chang An Avenue is a very broad street so there are numerous pedestrian tunnels for crossing it.  In addition  the subway stations double as pedestrian crossings.

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