Great Wall

Great Wall

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Some Comments on Beijing

Just thought I would post some things about our stay in Beijing that may be helpful to other families coming here to adopt.

Our agency is Holt and we stayed in the Novotel Peace Hotel.

1.)  All bathrooms in the airport, hotels, and fast food restaurants are westernized with toilets and tp.  Bathrooms that are not westernized are in most sit down restaurants and along the streets.  In those, there is always one stall that has a sit down toilet and the rest are squat with no tp.  Be prepared for a horrible smell.

2.) The Novotel is very nice!  Rooms and hotel restaurant are great! Great pool (no hot tub) and gym.

3.) You can exchange your money in the hotel lobby at a machine that takes a maximum of $420 USD at a time.

4.)  Yuan is chinese currency and is the same thing as RMB.  You may see one or the other on signs.

5.) All public signs have Chinese writing with English underneath.

6.)  The TV in the room gets about 6 english speaking channels including HBO and Cinemax.  The tv can also take an HDMI input.

7.) The wifi was spotty in our room (5th floor) and seemed to work well in the morning but poor at night.  There is also an ethernet plug but I could not connect through it.

8.) Facebook and Netflix were the only two websites we couldn't access normally.  We used Panda Pow VPN and were able to access them.

9.) The hotel has a very good restaurant/buffet that is free for breakfast and costs $30/person for dinner.  It includes many chinese and japanese dishes and a few american options like pastas and pizza.  The chinese food is very good.

10.)  There are cheaper restaurant options near the hotel.

11.)  The street the hotel is on is very nice with many high end stores.  Thee is a nice mall with a food court about 2 blocks away.  It includes McDonalds, Subway and Pizza Hut.

12.)  There is an excellent massage parlor across the street that is $32/person for a 70 minute foot massage.

13.)  The street market with all the vendors that have weird foods like starfish and octopus is about 3 blocks down the road.

14.)  The tours set up by Lotus are EXCELLENT and way under advertised by Holt.  We had an awesome guide that really showed us around.

15.)  The outlets in the room are weird.  They are all different and hard to access.  I had to use several adopters to plug in all of our stuff.  There is one 110V 5A outlet in the bathroom which is not enough to run a curling iron.  We used a voltage adopter on one of the plugs in the room and at high wattages, would cause our devices to hum.  Not sure why and we couldn't tell if any damage was done but all worked ok.