Beijing II

…Beijing continued…

The room is dark and quiet, the rhythm of my roommate’s breathing is violently disrupted by a phone call. It’s for work; he jumps right into the conversation, the person on the other side would have never guessed he was asleep.
At the conclusion of his call we decide to go to the information desk to see what is happening. They shrug their shoulders and shake their heads, we ask them about food and they only seem more confused. Fortunately two guys behind us speak English and know what is going on, they tell us that dinner is at 6pm. Its 5:30.
My roommate steps outside and says that he is going for a walk. I decide to join him so that I can see what lies beyond the familiar interior of the airport. Across the street we see the massage parlor that had mysteriously slipped a card under our door sometime in the afternoon. (The card made us laugh—on one side a picture of a Caucasian girl and on the other a local—trying to appeal to multiple cultures.) We turn left and walk parallel to the small street until it ends, swallowed by a bigger road. Along the way we cross an entrance to a temple and see several small restaurants. They are ever inviting with the steam rising off the hot food, beckoning me from the cold.
We return right at 6 and go to a room on the second floor of the hotel restaurant filled with round tables. I follow my roommate to a table whose only occupant is “Lazy Susan.” Half way through our meal a guy announces something from the entrance of the restaurant in either Mongolian or Mandarin and then says something about “30 minutes” in English.
We arrive at the airport around 8pm and are on the plane around 8:20pm. The flight goes smooth and I fall into a deep sleep only to be awoken by an announcement saying that they cannot land the plane in Ulaanbaatar because it of the weather. Unbelievable.
Back in Beijing it is 1am and I have entered the country officially for the second time in the same day. We go through the familiar maze to board our buses, but discover that they aren’t there yet. We wait half an hour. Someone comments, “they knew an hour and a half ago we were coming back, you would have thought they could have got the buses here.” Around 3am we arrive at our hotel, it looks like we’ve moved up a notch. Either that or they’re thinking about how to not lose customers.
My former roommate and I decide that we can tolerate each other for a few more hours so we share again. I look at the card key for my room, apparently the name of our hotel is the “Party School Advanced Training Center Training Building.” I ask my roommate if because of who he works for if he is going to get in trouble for staying here.
7am we go to the front desk to find out when we are supposed to leave because surprise, surprise no information was provided last night. I am a little peeved because I find out that we leave at 9am and breakfast is served at 8.
The whole flight I keep waiting for something to happen, for the captain to speak through the intercom and tell us we’re turning around. Instead he says we are landing in 20 minutes. Don’t get your hopes up yet, I tell myself.
We land and everyone laughs and claps.