Landmark Hotel, Beijing

We arrived at the Landmark Hotel in Beijing, got checked in, and promptly got almost no sleep.  Beijing was warm, humid and "hazy".  The hotel was nice, but the poor air conditioning was no match for the humidity, so that made it even harder to get some sleep.  All four of us slept fitfully, the kids woke up at something like 3 or 4AM and started to play and talk to each other quietly.  We all got up by 5AM, as it was clear that attempts at sleep weren't really successful at that point.

 

We went to breakfast at the hotel.   The hotel had a truly awesome buffet.  There was a large counter with all sorts of Chinese dishes--dumplings, noodles, rice, beef, chicken, vegetables.  Lots of fresh fruit--we all tried dragon fruit for the first time.  Dragon fruit has the consistency of a melon, has small dark seeds throughout the flesh, and a very mild taste.  There was a fried eggs/omelet bar, but the results of my request for "eggs over easy" looked much like the results of a request for "eggs well done".  There were several rolls of different kinds of breads which you could cut slices from, but the breads were dry and crumbly--they weren't very popular.  Five different kinds of juices, and all the tea that you could desire.  Jeremy, ever the cheese fiend, found the cheese section.  I'd seen it, and noticed that the cheeses looked a bit older--I didn't see anybody taking any.  So when Jeremy came back to the table with a massive cheese wedge as his main course--it surely weighed half a pound--I was pretty sure that nobody would mind.