I arrived in Beijing on Saturday afternoon. I was grinning wit excitement to finally be setting foor on the Chinese mainland. I was also totally unprepared by Hong Kong for what was about to happen.

The Beijing airport has no English-labeled and convenient train connecting it to the city. All it has (besides the hordes of taxis who promised me "very good price") is a handful of bus lines, labeled only in Chinese characters. Quickly realizing that I had no hope of deciphering where any of them went, I bought a ticket for one and random and hoped for the best. I still have no idea where it was going, but it stopped near an identifiable subway station, so I jumped off and headed underground. The subway is cheap, clean, efficient and (most importantly) labeled in pinyin (romanised Chinese). I had no trouble navigating to the hostel I had found in Lonely Planet, which is in an Qing dynasty building built by a Mongolian general on a narrow alley north of the Forbidden City. It was a bit pricier than some of the other hostels, but in my mind, well worth it -- especially when its appearance more than lived up to my expectations. Apparently, many other people felt this way, too, because it was totally booked. So I found the nearest hostel on my map and trudged through the city's busiest shopping area to get there. (I was twice approached by "art students" asking me to visit their "exhibition" on this walk alone.)

I stopped on the way to try to get dinner in a touristy but interesting series of side streets, where Uyghurs were selling fried meat on a stick (along with fried cicadas, scorpions and seahorses). I sat down at a streetside restaurant and attempted to order dumplings. When that apparently failed, I pulled out my phrasebook and the waiter pointed at the characters for fried noodles and asked if I wanted it. Unfortunately, Chinese has no all-purpose word for assent. You can say "Good" or "I want" or "It is," but you can't just say "Yes," which means that you have to have at least some idea what you're agreeing to before you can agree. (I suppose this is good in some ways.) Fortunately, "Do you want it?" is within my limited grasp of Chinese, so I managed to agree that I did want it. Out came the fried noodles, followed a few minutes later by the dumplings that I had thought I had failed to order. Stuffed from my double helping of dinner, I strapped my backpack on again and headed back into the city.

When I finally reached the other hostel, I was assured by several helpful Chinese that it had closed, but (miraculously), they could take me to another hostel! Since they were loading another backpacker into their van, which boasted a Hostelling International logo, I decided to go along for the ride. I still don't know if the other hostel really is closed, but the one I found is great: it's cheaper than in Hong Kong (RMB30/night), it's cleaner and newer than in Hong Kong, it has a real shower with working hot water, and its staff are very helpful and speak a little English. It's called the Feiying Inernational Youth Hostel, just east of the Changchunjie subway station on the Loop Line.

Tired though I was from wandering Beijing with my bag all day, I agreed to go back out with a German guy from the hostel to explore the shopping district I had passed through. It occupies a large pedestrian thoroughfare east of the Forbidden City. It is, predictably, a lot like major shopping districts in most other major cities in the world (except for the guys on one street selling fried scorpions).