We all trek into a reserved room and find seats around the large round tables with lazy-susan's in the middle. Tsing Tao beer is poured, but I select tea instead. Not surprisingly, the tea in China is very good - without bothering with sugar or milk - and we usually even get our choice of black tea or green tea.
Then the stream of dishes begins. Plate after plate after plate is added to the lazy-susan and a quick explanation made as to what *this* delight is: Lotus root,
Bok Choi, Prawns encased in creamy-cheesy covering and crispy stuff 
and, of course, the Beijing Duck - carefully sliced and provided on duck dishes. You then take a slice or two of duck, some dark red sauce, and a "wrap", fold it all together, and pop it into your mouth. 
It lives up to its billing. Subtle but WOW. Tender, juicy, moist, crisp, tangy. Worth the effort. Very nice.
We stuff ourselves and I top the whole thing off with (blush) "Magnum Ice Cream Bars".
A guilty pleasure. Our daughter *loved* them when she toured Europe - and they've found their way to China as well. Typically, Chinese dessert is slices of watermelon and/or oranges - and I have a way bigger sweet tooth than that, so I enjoy the Western-style dessert instead.It's still light out as we board the bus back to our hotel - and drive past the burned-out "CCTV" building I mentioned before - the one that looks like a couple of legs with a bridge across them
. Next to that building is another - which is all burned out. 
Perhaps you saw mention of the fire in the news a couple of years ago. They were celebrating the "topping off" of the brand-new building and were using fireworks (which, in China, is really *not* unusual). We're told that they were a bit egotistical about the celebration - telling the local police to mind their own business when people complained about the noise and long celebration and flaunting of some safety laws. So. A sky rocket accidentally landed on the 14th floor and caught the building on fire. And the building hadn't had the fire-control system installed yet. And the whole building burned up. OOps! It was considered "too bad", but some people weren't as sorry as they might have otherwise been - given the cavalier attitude that the building owners had shown. The second building is being slowly gutted and rebuilt, but it took some time to make the plan as to what to do: it shares the same huge concrete-slab foundation with the "legs" building and it was feared that if they simply tore down the burned one - that the whole slab would tip from the weight distribution - so they're having to carefully do the reconstruction "in place".Back to the hotel and time to do some more computer stuff - and I consciously note that the electrical outlets in China seem to be designed to accommodate "whatever" kind of electricity you need: 50Hz, 60Hz, 110VAC, 220VAC - it's a "combination plug" that automatically supplies the right kind of juice just by what plug holes you use. It isn't obvious that there *is* a "standard Western 2-prong plug hole", but it's there. In addition, our new camera's battery charger specifically warned us that it has it's *own* transformer and such - to accommodate anything from 110 to 220 - so that we should *not* use a separate converter or it will burn out the charger(!!). Kathy had carefully obtained converters and plug adapters - but we don't ever need them. Perhaps this is only because we're staying in 5-star hotels, but it sure makes things easier.
.And to bed.
And this is only our *first* full day!
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