Made it!

And I'm in more-or-less the same number of pieces I started out with. These last, um, ten or eleven hours have been so eventful that I doubt I'll ever catch up.... but I'll try.

I started out by saving myself about $20 (US) by not jumping in a cab with the guy who offered me a ride first thing. He wanted 600 RMB for a ride into Beijing from the airport... which is a beautiful airport, by the way. Then, he went down to 400. Exchange rate is about 6.75 RMB to the US$, so he wanted a big chunk of change.

The punchline? The flagged rate is 100 RMB. Score one for the good guys, and the guidebook.

So then I found myself at one of the bus stations in Beijing. It was PACKED and CRAZY full of people... very few of whom I towered over, by the way. So there I am with my ginormous bag, plus my backpack, in line with a bunch of people with much less consideration for personal space than most Europeans, let alone Americans. Now add in a bunch of people who have no consideration for waiting in line. Lots of shouting and jostling and pushing. The guy behind me gave me a lesson in line management (turn your bag sideways to keep people from passing in front of you, which inevitably ends up with one person deciding that they were in line in front of you all along), delivered in thick pudonghua... which is to say, I didn't understand a single word of it.

Quick aside... there was this guy I heard talking to his wife, and I swear all I heard was "err, arr, arr, err". It was a total caricature of the Beijing accent.

So the uniformed officer was no more effective than anyone else at controlling this kind of behavior. But it was an interesting experience, and I ended up with my 35 RMB bus ticket to Tianjin. After that, it was a lot of smiling, a few show-my-ticket-and-smiles, and a "对不对?" tacked onto the end.

More later.... there's so much more!