January 11, 2007



It's good we arrived very late last night, as the hotel today by the light of day is not so wonderful. Read the title....drumroll please....The Beijing Golden Palace Silver Street Hotel, and you would think virtual mansion. Ooooh, aaaaahh, lovely.

The place is a dive. It fronts an alleyway, but I guess its redeeming quality is that it is only a 10 minute walk from the Forbidden City (we were told...more on that later) and a five minute walk to the Wang Fu Jing pedestrian district should you want to shop.

I originally had reservations at a different hotel, but they closed unexpectedly last week for renovations. I got an urgent e-mail in Wuhan, telling me that we needed to find a different hotel in Beijing. I made the mistake of letting the travel agent choose one without really investigating myself other than looking at online photos and saying "Ok." If you google the name, some of the photos that come up depict a rather opulent lobby area, and they claim to be between 3.5 and 4 stars, so I thought we were getting a killer deal for 50.00/night.

Caveat emptor...you never get something for nothing. The rooms aren't decorated too bad, but the carpets are beyond stained and dirty. Downright gross enough that I made the rule that no one will remotely consider walking on them without slippers....as if my kids would remember.



Here is a photo of the bathroom. Not too bad, but they conveniently used the camera angle that they did on purpose. They don't show you that if you take a shower, there is no recessed stall. Just a tile floor for the whole bathroom with a shower curtain so when you shower, water goes everywhere. Heaven forbid someone would need to use the toilet while another person was showering, as the first person would need hip waders.

Of course they offered Jeff and the boys a business suite again since they had four people in their room. They didn't charge us at all for the upgrade, but since their carpets are equally dirty I'm not too envious. They actually have a huge shower with glass and a door, but the metal track is bolted about half an inch off the floor and water goes everywhere in their bathroom as well!

The heating/AC unit has a snazzy remote but the directions are only in Chinese, so heaven forbid if you want to change the temperature in the room.


Almost no one here speaks English and the breakfast buffet was Chinese only much to Alyssa's chagrin. She has been desperately seeking some kind of familiar American food but I don't think it will happen here unless we try their Western restaurant tomorrow morning. Congee and bok choy and pickled veggies with hard boiled eggs were not what she was looking for this morning. They did have noodles which redeemed them in the eyes of my other kids. We asked for orange juice and got boiling hot Tang; way too hot to attempt to drink.

Oh well, it is only for two more nights and I am tired enough to not want to pack up everything and hunt for a different hotel, so here we will stay and make the best of it. We plan to be out of the hotel touring for most of the time anyway, so as long as the sheets are clean I can deal with it. We are off to the Great Wall this morning, so it's on with 4 layers of clothes and out to our waiting van.