Point profess your Excellency seat

We are in Beijing and already nearly broke. The title is from the fire escape map in our room. The flight from Zurich was 9 hours (not 19) and since we didn't reserve a seat, we ended up with the bulkhead seats that nobody wanted to reserve. They're supposed to have a little extra legroom because there's no seat in front of them, but I still pressed my feet into the bulkhead if I unbent my knees even a little. The tray table and video screen are in the armrests so it's hard to use both at once, and there's a big screen with the flight map in front of us which made it much harder to sleep. The seats are the first row of Economy class. I snuck into Business class after boarding and enjoyed stretching my legs until the crew shooed me out with exclamations of, "We cannot allow this!" The flight was nice: the food was good and we watched another couple of movies but did not sleep much. Both our big backpacks arrived in Beijing but mine was soaked through with water and mud. I took it to report right away and they gave me 200 yuan for my trouble or to pay for laundry. The woman was swiftly professional and I was very calm through the process, gaining face. Near there we changed all of the Thai Baht that we had, and the Swiss Francs I got in change for my water, and hundreds of dollars, all at atrocious exchange rates and commission. We found a change place with much better rates the minute after we left the baggage claim area. Israeli shekels are worthless here; nobody would exchange them. Even for the simplest directions within the airport we needed to ask the information desk, but with their direction we purchased two SIM cards (for 90 shekels each!) that can make local calls and data. Leia installed an app for her Yahoo mail before we left so she can see emails on her phone - I didn't and I can't do it in China. (Update: I later did find someone to help me install the app.) It was a silly ordeal trying to find a Chinese dictionary. I foolishly asked the information guy where I could buy a "Phrase-book" and he said I can't get Facebook in China. Then I said I wanted a "book" at a "bookstore" because I wanted to learn how to say things like "hello" and "thank you" in Chinese, and he offered to write down the Chinese word for "book" for me. Eventually we figured out that the German-English dictionary on Leia's phone is also a German-Chinese dictionary, and thus we found the Chinese word for "Woerterbuch" or dictionary and got him to point us to the bookstore. The clerk there said with firm conviction they didn't have any such thing. So I found two myself, and we chose the one with the pictures. So far it seems to be worse than useless to us, except to amuse the locals with our ineptitude. All those things cost a lot of money, so I was in no mood for a smoking limo driver to offer us a ride into town for 400 yuan. He even showed us a bogus price list that he'd laminated. I firmly said, "No, thank you," which lost me some face but got him off our case. He tried to regain face by pointing us to a meter taxi that drove us swiftly to our hostel at a fifth of the price. Our Dragon King Hostel (not to be confused with neighboring Happy Dragon and Lucky Dragon hostels) is in a seedy alley in what might be a hostel district, adjoining the crack district. There's a more gentrified neighborhood on the street at the end of the alley. We ate breakfast there after leaving our bags at the hostel because our room would not be ready until noon. We had several fluffy yeast dumplings filled with meat or spinach - Leia had only the meat ones. Then we wandered around peeking into closed businesses until we settled into a bakery/cafe to rest and write this. So far the neighborhood reminds us of Thai streets, but way pricier. Still a lot cheaper than Israel, and the drivers seem to be calmer. In the last 46 hours or so, we've slept or napped with our eyes closed maybe a total of 6. I'm surprised we're still as functional as we are.