Mar 23/24, Monday/Tuesday - In Transit

Our flight from San Francisco to Chengdu was relatively empty in Economy Plus so we split up to give us each an entire row to ourselves.  Mary is short enough that she could lay down across the three seats in her row and take a nap.  We arrived in Chengdu on time and were met by our guide Low (probably spelled incorrectly).

We are staying in the Dorsett Grand hotel, very nice.  No sightseeing today as we arrived in late afternoon, so after dinner we hit the beds as early as we were able.  China is 15 hours ahead of California time so our bio-clocks were really off.  One item of note is that the entire country has one official time zone (Beijing Standard Time) even though the country physically covers five time zones.  The beds were actually fairly comfortable; on our last trip to China we found that most beds are extremely hard. 

Overall, in most places we saw very few, if any, Caucasian tourists.  This was partly because we were visiting places not frequented by them, partly because we were off season for some areas.