We're not in Korea anymore...

The 25 hour boat ride from Incheon, Korea to Tianjin, China was relatively uneventful. Alex and I shared a room with a Korean woman and her son. We were woken on Saturday morning to the sound of them munching on chips and watching the movie "Team America". I have not seen this film yet but believe that it was made by the same individuals that put together South Park...so I wasn't surprised to hear every vulgarity possible streaming from the TV. Our roomates were also not phased by these expressions and spent the morning bobbing away to music with the lyrics, "America! F&*% Yeah!"
Admittedly, this was a nice diversion from the sound of hoarking emanating from the hallways....

As we crossed the dateline, so too, did we enter into a realm of inefficiency and uncleanliness. Men were spitting all over the boat and the perfectly flushable toilets were brimming with all kinds of nastiness.
When we docked, we waited an hour to simply exit the boat. We spent 10 minutes being squashed into a bus to be driven 20 seconds and spit back out again...after exiting the bus we could see the staircase we had left the boat on! It would have taken less time to walk than for the hundreds of people on the boat to be transferred via one bus 100m.

The two days that it took us to get from Tianjin to Beijing were filled with frustration. It seems that the word "NO" in China is multipurpose, meaning "That's not available", "I don't understand", "Come back in 5 minutes", "Go to a different counter", "etc.", "etc."....so you can imagine that communication has been rather difficult. No one seems interested in helping us and many people (particularly taxi drivers) are intent on scamming us.
Alex and I have been in Beijing for a couple of nights now and have been able to take in some of the sights. It's been great to see some of the famous places that you read about in history books - hopefully our first impressions will be altered by more exposure to the food, people and sights.