Woke up at 7:30, only a few hours of sleep, but much refreshed.
Breakfast was kinda crappy in this cheap hotel. “Orange juice” was actually Tang, dilluted with too much water. And the first cup drawn from the dispenser was full of black floaties. Disturbing.
Bus trip back to airport didn’t seem as interminable as the trip to the hotel. We were issued new boarding passes, and are now waiting on the plane. Soon, with luck, we will be in Beijing.
Ok, got to Beijing without further incident. Checked into our hotel, the Capital Hotel, which more than compensates us for the crappy one we spent last night in. Multiple nice restaurants. A spacious room, bath entirely done in granite, and a really cool controller on the bedside table that controls every light in the room, the air conditioner, the TV and music system, has an alarm clock in it, and displays the time in four time zones! Except the TV controls on it don’t actually work. I guess they replaced the TVs with new ones that aren’t compatible. And we have free Internet.
Conveniently found a business card on the floor behind the door, offering assorted types of massage from variously-descibed ladies. I guess a previous traveller was partaking of some of China’s spicier delicacies.
Putting a damper on everything, Sabrina has caught my cold too. Her symptoms are different from mine, though. Seems like quite a fever. After sleeping under two blankets for a few hours, we’ve gone out to a local hospital to get her some medicine. They don’t really have walk-in clinics or doctors in private practice here.
Beijing, what I’ve seen of it so far, has been nice. Doesn’t seem to have the energy and excitement of Shanghai, but it does seem more spacious and safer to walk the streets with less chance of getting run down by car, bus, truck, moped or bicycle (individually or in groups). But that’s based on a very small sample, I may change my opinion.
Sabrina got a mosquito bite in the waiting room of the hospital. I can scarce imagine a worse place to get a mosquito bite. I guess a malaria clinic in Myanmar would be worse.
After walking this way and that, blood test, cashier, blood test, doctor, dispensary, cashier, dispensary, we ended up with a bagful for medicines, and a trip to an IV room, where they gave her a glucose drip with some antibiotic drug in it. Weird to me, since a common cold is usually a virus, not a bacterial infection. The IV drip took almost two hours, and did nothing for her fever or joint pain, so that the end of it, she was weak and exhausted and suffering.
Having eaten nothing in some time, and all restaurants closed by now, we picked up some canned congee and yogurt at a convenience store on the walk home. Had that, and she took a couple Tylenols (with some difficulty, she is not good at swallowing pills.). The Tylenol really helped with her fever and pain quite a lot. The other medicines seemed really unnecessary to me, including more antibiotic pills, some kind of antiviral, and whole lot of some Chinese traditional medicine in vials. They’re too foul-tasting to drink.
Went to sleep.