Day Fifteen: Fly to Beijing, play with Vanessa, and a weird dinner.

So on Monday morning we flew to Beijing. On the plane they gave us a chicken and tomato sandwich, after which I asked the stewardess if they had any vegetarian meals. She smiled and said she thought they had one more left. The she came back a minute later, smiled again and handed me a new package.
It was a tomato sandwich.
She also gave me this to wipe my hands with which made me laugh enough to forget about my gross tomato sandwich.
Anyway, we got to Beijing and this time were able to give Vanessa her Hostess cupcakes that had been sent by Vanessa's boyfriend via Gordon's bag. Unfortunately, at this point they were more like Hostess mush. She still seemed quite pleased though.
So seeing as we only had a few hours left in China, we did the only logical thing- went shopping. FirstVanessa introduced us to these yummy treats that I forgot the name of, but they are like creps with chili and fried tofu and egg and sweetness.
I decided that I don't really like shopping in Beijing after that experience. There are a lot of tourists there. I can't stand that :)
Later that night we had to meet up with a friend of a friend of a friend because somebody was nice enough to send our books (from our photo shoot in Mudan Jiang) to meet us in Beijing via the train. So we met up with this guy who had them but the whole situation was very weird and funny. We had no clue who he was but he had us meet him in the parking lot of some big building where he pulled up in his all black car with tinted windows and then insisted that we go inside and eat with him. Our driver told us it would be fine and he would wait for us.
I think it was some kind of government building. He said he worked there. We went up to like the 15th floor and there was this weird set up of food- not a restaurant . The food was really tasty but the guy disappeared for the entire time we were eating and then somebody came to tell us we needed to leave.
I'm sure it comes partly form the language barrier but I think it's more related to a cultural barrier. Things just often don't make a lot of sense to me. I'm always slightly confused about where I'm going and who I'm supposed to meet there and what the purpose of the meeting was. And this was a perfect example.

So then the 3 of us went and got some tapioca ball drinks and did the last of our shopping. This man gave Vanessa some love letters/pictures.
That night Vanessa let us sleep on her floor and it was surprisingly comfortable, probably #2 behind the boat beds, but we weren't supposed to be in her dorm so we had to sneak in and out.