It took over 24 hours to travel from CVG to Beijing, inconveniently broken into three legs and an early morning cab ride. We left CVG around 1:30 PM Thursday for MSP and worked our way through a three hour layover until we left for SEA. (Kevin actually made some progress on the Powerpoint presentation for our paper.) In SEA our flight was delayed an hour, returned to the original time, and then delayed again, but we managed grab a beer and a bite to eat. We were all carded! Huh? I suspect she wanted to see our AARP cards but our passports did the job. The 11-hour flight to PEK was actually a 12-hour flight. The plane wasn't crowded but it was an old 767, lacking the room and amenities I was hoping for. It was 1:00 am Saturday morning PEK-time when we finally arrived. I lost a Friday somewhere. We got through customs remarkably fast and took a 40-minute cab ride to our hotel, which turns out not to have been our hotel since they had no record of our reservations. Yikes! They passed us off to another business hotel around the corner. Fine, but they didn't speak any English and accepted only cash (CNY). Fine, but we only speak English and we don't carry much cash. So here we are for two days in this hotel while we figure out what we should do for the rest of the week. Part of that figuring-out process is on today's agenda, along with a reception for the conference tonight. If they handle the reception as well as they handled our hotel reservations, we'll be eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

It's raining here. 6:30 on the morning Beijing-time; 6:30 in the evening Rudy-time.

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