So, at last, after any number of adventures and travels in Mongolia, the time arrived at last to make my way back to America, this time with my sister safely in tow. So, after rising early in the morning and catching a ride to the Ulan Bator International Airport (though really, since it’s just about the only airport in Mongolia, it pretty much has to be international if you want to go anywhere from it) we got to spend a last couple of hours in Mongolia lounging about the concourse looking at all the famous Khans (Genghis Khan, Shakka Khan, Wratha Khan, etc.) and doing a bit of last minute duty-free yak wool Christmas shopping, we embarked upon the Kubla Khan (appropriately enough) and set out once more for Beijing.

The Beijing airport being altogether uneventful and uninteresting, we caught a shuttle bus in accordance with our instructions and it thoughtfully deposited us in the middle of a freeway in the middle of Beijing, a city of some fifteen million people who don’t speak American, with all our luggage. Things looked bleak indeed, our only map of the city shoed only where all the Captain D’s in China were located, and someone had already solved the Jumble shaped like a lobster. For a few brief and terrible minutes, I considered doing a British and French Allied Army of 1860 thing and wreaking a bit of unspeakable havoc upon the unwitting metropolis, but happily, a woman who had just gotten back from preventing earthquakes in India (home of Hinduism, Kwikimarts, and America’s finest tech support) was there to call Meg and Bryan on the phone and sound incredibly intense as if Liz and I were in the very extremity of peril, thereby freaking them out and getting us some taxi directions which ultimately brought us safely to our destination. All in all it was kind of like that Bill Murray movie where he’s over in Japan and nobody speaks English and everything is weird and he gets all angsty, Ghostbusters.

Beijing being our home for the next day and a half, we decided to go out and take in a few of the local sights. First up was Tiananmen Square, which is kind of like the Mall in Washington D.C, the primary difference being that the government never ran any protesters over with tanks on the Mall. Anyway, the whole square is surrounded by all the various things you might expect, governmental capitol buildings, national museums, and the Chairman Maonument, where the Great Leader is kept pickled in an old mason jar for the enjoyment and worship of onlookers. Also included is one building which you might not expect, the world’s largest Kentucky Fried Chicken. No, seriously, its like, a three-story department store with a big glass front and café seating and a huge picture of the Colonel the puts even the giant one of Mao across the square to shame. It is nothing short of absolutely awe-inspiring on so many patriotically deep-fried, eleven different herbs and spices levels. And the thing is, it’s not the only one; there’s hundreds of KFCs in Beijing, the Chinese absolutely love them, it’s the most awesome thing ever. Also, Beijing now has a Wal-Mart, which pretty much means that communism there has maybe ten years, tops, before it falls before an unstemmable tide of Dale Earnhart memorabilia and 67¢ pizzas.

We stopped for lunch at a place offering such delicacies as "roast uncooked cow-tongue-shaped object (mmm) and then at a little coffee shop where I made a most amazing discovery. The Chinese have invented the uber-danish. Okay, we all know that danishes are already one of the most highly advanced snack foods in the galaxy, being as how they have that croissanty outer crust, that delicious frostingy mantle, and finally a molten core composed of jam or cheese or something. What could possibly be better than this, the very pinnacle of pastry evolution? In a word: ham. It’s that simple, and that diabolically brilliant, a ham danish. But that’s not all, they also do Kielbasa danishes, and even the rarely attempted pizza danish, a pastry which defies all the laws of nature and good nutrition as mankind understands them. They also had something on the menu called "Sea World Pizza" which makes me kind of wonder if anyone’s seen Shamu lately.

And of course, there’s the 2008 Beijing Olympics coming up too. You remember how when you were a kid there’d be something cool coming up, like the Transformers Movie or the fall of the Soviet Union or getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas or something? And you would dedicate every waking moment and bend every fibre of your very being, mind, body and soul to wanting it to get here as soon as possible? And finally your mom would just get tired of you being such a little spazz about it that she’d flip out and be all like, "Dammit Ben, Christmas isn’t for another two weeks abd for crying out loud you’re 25 years old anyway why do you need a BB gun anyway?!" That’s how excited Beijing is about the 2008 Olympics. Like, everything in China say 2008 Olymipics on it, whether or not it’s even remotely Olympically oriented, like car keys and door knobs. They have a giant Dick Clark clock right in Tiananmen Square counting down the very seconds until the Olympics. They’ve already chosen five cute little repulsive teletubby/enraged Buddhist diety mascots symbolizing diversity and the inexorable progress of socialism. They’ve even started a program encouraging all the cab drivers to learn English (rumor has it that if it works well, they might even try it in New York next). So yes, Virginia, China is totally psyched about the Olympics, one might say with some justification.

So anyway, for dinner, Avian Flu be damned, we went to a Peking Duck restaurant way back in what appeared to be Beijing’s mogwai-infested Chinatown. There they brought out the duck (head still attached so we could tell that it, indeed, a duck and not merely some hapless midget or a plague marmot or some other such simulacrum being culinarily foisted off upon us) and proceeded to carve it for us right there at the table, which was very nice indeed (the carving, I mean, not the table, though it did match the decor nicely, I might add). Also we got a side dish with Chinese cabbage (or as the Chinese call it, cabbage) and some Chinese Death Peppers. You see, they put these insanely hot peppers in the dish while they’re cooking to give a bit of kick to the rest of it, but really they’re like tea leaves and cauliflower and not intended by any stretch of the imagination for human consumption, a fact which nobody alerted me to until I foolhardily ate one and spent the next three hours feeling it burn its wicked death peppery way through my upper digestive tract like a tiny little porcupine made out of lava and jujubes.

After this, we caught a taxi back to the apartment and had some ice cream, and sat around chatting amicably until my radical and partisan political beliefs about terrorism (kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out) put everybody else off, leaving us with no recourse but to discuss baby names and kittens, until my radical and partisan political beliefs about kittens (kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out) put everybody off and it was time to simply call it a night.