I worked Friday, so Somchai was on his own for the day. Beijing is not a tourist friendly city at the best of times, and in the summer, the city is extremely hot and humid. But the real deterrent is that for the middle seven months of the year, the air is mud brown, a combination of smoke, sand from the nearby Gobi desert, and huge amounts of pollution. So it's hard to breathe, and depressing to be outside, since the sun can't poke through the soup. An added issue for this trip is that a US spy jet just collided with a Chinese plane over Chinese airspace, and the Chinese are pissed. It's actually hard to tell when they're mad or happy, because everyone is generally dour, but there were lots of protests and a couple of US consulates were burned down. So, understandably, Somchai stayed around the hotel, doing some shopping and got a massage at the hotel. The massage technique here is quite different from in Thailand, which is mostly about sex. Here, the masseurs are decked out in surgeon gowns, with rubber gloves and hair caps, for reasons completely unknown to me.

After work, we went to the hotel's gym, which is actually very good, but housed in the basement in a really ugly room (since much improved in the renovation). We then went to a nearby art gallery, and bought one of my favorite paintings. It's hard to describe, but it's basically a series of grave rubbings, plus some printing plates from a Qing dynasty book called "I'm here, but lost, which way do I turn now?", which I think is a very existential title for an old book. Then there's lots of red and gold paint lashings to tie it all together, anyway I like it. Somchai hated the owner, a pushy woman who kept giving us discounts because we were her special friends, even though we had never met. So we actually didn't buy it until the day we left because he just wanted to be difficult with her.

Had dinner at the hotel's Italian restaurant, Aria. Nice design, average to tasteless food, poor service of course (11-15-8). Main reason I'm mentioning it is I need a photo for this post, and fortunately I've got one of the China World website. Fortunately, in the next post we'll actually leave the hotel.

We arrived in hot, filthy Beijing and got a car to the China World Hotel, the Island Shangri-La's sister property in Beijing. It is even more soulless than its Hong Kong counterpart, which benefited for years from being the only luxury property in the city. Now new hotels sprout up every week and China World has struggled to keep up. They're easy to pick off, because they're stuck with a positively ugly building, a huge glass box that screams out two star, package tour. It's staffed with unfriendly, non-English speaking people, which used to be your only choice, but the newer hotels like the Hyatt and St. Regis have managed to find much more capable staff. And the huge size of the place, sitting in the middle of one of the world's most crowded cities, ensures that the lobby will be throbbing like a rave party 24/7, except the ravers will be Chinese businessmen rather than high teenagers. When we stayed there for this trip, the place hadn't been modernised at all, so the ugliness of the exterior permeated the interior as well. I continue to stay there for business, so I'm happy to report that the place has been modernised and is much fresher looking, though the staff is still miserable and the lobby still chaotic. China World (Room-4, Facilities-7, Service-1) The photos of the interior are post-renovation; I have no idea how they managed to clear the lobby for the photo.