After a good flight, we arrived in Beijing on Saturday afternoon. The weather was relatively balmy, warmer than what we left in Chicago on Friday. The taxi trip downtown from the airport was quick, a far cry from last year when we reached Beijing during that year's first snow fall and traffic crawled making our cab trip three hours. Beijing is an international city and the view from the car on the ride from the airport is dotted with familiar signs: Coca Cola, Starbucks, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and much more. Like most international capitals, one also finds a measure of traffic, smog, tall buildings, and plenty of vitality.

At least when on the beaten track, Beijing is getting to seem a bit more familiar to us, although the inability to read most signs remains challenging at times. Despite our limitations in comprehension, Linda and I generally like to get out of the hotel and eat at small restaurants within walking distance. We tend to look for those places that are full of local clientele. Most of the time in Beijing, you can find menus in English, and there are many choices in places to eat since our hotel is on Wangfujing street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the capital.

We were very happy to receive a phone call on Saturday night from our colleague, Anne, who already had arrived in Rizhao (a coastal city in Shandong that is our base for this study) to prepare for our survey. She had already passed through Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, where Shandong University is situated and where we all will go following our survey in the Rizhao area.

Sunday was a great day to join the local shoppers, bikers, and strollers on Wangfujing street. We bought a few things to eat for our overnight train trip to Rizhao. Many Chinese treat train travel like a giant moving picnic, and they are right that eating does help pass the time. On the subject of food, we always enjoy the large breakfast buffets that they serve at many Beijing hotels. These buffets feature foods from the east and the west, and for us they work as a bridge since our diet will be strictly Chinese once we leave Beijing.

The night train to Rizhao does not depart Beijing Railway Station until 10:20 PM, so Sunday was a bit of a waiting game. Still transitioning time zones, we endeavored to read and work in the hotel lobby, but actually dozed away much of the afternoon. The recuperation was needed to fight the crowds in the train station, which always seems to be a mass of humanity no matter what time of day, day of the week, or season of the year. Our biggest problem is that we have far too much luggage, lots more to carry than 99% of the Chinese. So with six weeks of clothes, papers, and equipment in our suitcases, it seems that we often are on the edge of control as we move up and down stairs and ramps and around corners jostling almost every step of the way.

We always breathe a big sigh of relief when we find our train, and our car, and move all our luggage into our soft sleeper compartment. When Linda and I travel alone, we share these enclosed four-person bunks with two strangers, but that never has presented any problems. The soft sleeper compartments are so much easier to be seated in than the alternative, hard sleepers, which fit roughly 30-40 people in cars jammed with triple-decker bunks. Only a few times in all of our China trips have we been unable to get the more roomy and comfortable soft sleeper seats, but the memories of those trips when we haven't sure enable us relish the more private bunks that we have.

The train trip seemed long to me as I was still plagued by the 2 AM jet lag wall that kept me awake much of the night. Nevertheless, I still enjoy hearing the clicking of the rails, and once daylight came, the views of the rolling Shandong landscape were fabulous. Shandong literally means eastern mountains, and in parts of the province there is much more relief that one tends to see on the North China Plain.