Seat 17 G

Boy can I ponder a lot of stuff on an 11.5 hour flight!  It was far superior to the 15 hour odyssey from Instanbul a couple of years back that killed my travel bug for well over a year.  Seat choice is everything, though.  We had the two bulkhead seats in the very front of coach that gave us about 3 feet of legroom and so I did not suffer my normal claustrophobia issues although I still had to sit upright for all 11.5 hours.  Here is how much leg room we had

It’s just now morning here – we arrived at night, in a rainstorm, and so we’ve seen nothing.  We’re heading out to tour the Forbidden City today and so I’m hoping for pictures later on, but, for now, we’ve got a view of a construction site of sorts out of our hotel room window.  It will be interesting to be on a tour – and NOT in control of our lodging, which is usually one of the best things about the trips I plan out.  My main focus is always location and I can’t yet tell what we’re in the middle of over here.

Here’s a view off to the right of our room.  I think that’s the Forbidden City hidden in there off in the distance before the skyscrapers: 

But, even more impressively, here is the construction site we directly face:

Breakfast time here – hopefully pics I send out later will be a little more encouraging, from a tourist point of view.  Our hotel room itself is quite nice, although I had a dream that after we got settled, the Chinese government placed another family in here to live with us for the next 3 days as there was “plenty of room” -a single mom and two kids.

V