Saturday August 9

We made it to the hotel.  No idea how.  We took a shuttle bus to downtown.  Talked to a group of people whose only English was "hello" and "Sonk you". We pointed to some words that they sounded out since the words weren't written in Chinese. Somehow we got a cab to within a block of the hotel.  The cab driver ask a random guy on the street about shishily.  We are staying at the Sicily Hotel.  Random Guy vaguely pointed and we ended up in the right place.  It's very much an adventure.  We can find a few words that use our alphabet, but even those we can't pronounce.  It makes getting anywhere not so easy.  Even settling on a room was a trick.  We are here though.  Benn and I swapped emails using my blackberry.  Haven't been successful yet with phone or text.

We're all pretty tired.  A few things of note on the way.

Davis slept through a meal.

MOO almost lost camera privileges by photographing trash cans in the Tokyo airport.  That was too touristy for words.  She has been warned.

We saw a Home Depot and a KFC in Beijing.

Our hotel has a beer vending machine.  That doesn't happen in our part of Georgia.
I'm watching The Longest Yard in Chinese with Chinese subtitles, or maybe it's Japenese.  I know it's not French and there aren't enough J's for Slovenian.

Time for bed after 31 hours of nothing but airplane naps.  Tomorrow is another chance to get lost, but we have to get our tickets and figure out how to get to the course so we're ready for the race Monday.
Tom