The Beijing Marriott Great Wall is a great, great hotel. The level of service is absolutely amazing. And on top of that, they provide invaluable information at breakfast.

I imagine that everyone has seen a photo of the Forbidden City, home of Chinese emperors for hundreds of years, from this angle. But we always wondered why they called this building a “city”.

What we didn’t know is that the building in this photo is merely the “lobby” for the city. When you add up all the large palaces, small palaces, halls, towers, pavilions and belvederes, there are 8,707 rooms. The grounds are huge and the buildings just seem to go on forever.

In fact, it’s so large that one emperor had nearly 10,000 eunuchs living at the Forbidden City. A little known fact is that when he died they all became advertising account executives.

So there we are gasping for air on one of the Great Wall’s steeper sections when we see three guys dressed like cowboys. “They have to be in a band,” Jamie said.

So, true to her belief that I speak to every stranger I meet, I asked them what three guys in cowboy hats were doing in China.

“We’re in a band,” the one on the right said. “We’re called the Texas Tenors.”

Believe it or not, they do country music and classical music. Gotta give ’em credit, it’s an interesting niche.

They said they’d performed recently in Plano, Texas, which is right next door to McKinney, our favorite little town in the Lone Star State.

Check out the Texas Tenors’ website.

And now, back to our regular programming.

The Great Wall really is great. You can’t visit China without seeing it for yourself. I think it’s a law.

The most popular section of the Great Wall is at Badaling because it’s the site of the wall’s closest approach to Beijing. It’s also why we visited a section of the wall slightly further away.

Our guide said 100,000 people had visited the Badaling section of the wall the previous day. He showed us a photo with the entire wall packed full of people. I mean really packed. They were shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could see.

We never knew the Great Wall was so steep. Our calves reminded us of it this morning.

There’s something very strange going on here in Beijing. People stare at Jamie like she’s from another planet. It really is quite bizarre.

It all started when Jamie was doing a silly pose in the Forbidden City. A young Chinese woman and her mother (just to Jamie’s left in the photo) approached me to ask if I would use their camera to take a photo of the three of them together. They were giddy — almost beyond words — when she agreed to do it.

Today was the weirdest of all. People were taking photos and videos of her all day. For example, we were resting our feet at a sidewalk cafe when I noticed a young couple standing in the middle of the street snapping one photo after another of Jamie. I said, “Hey, Jamie, wave at them.” She did. They took the photo of her waving, broke into huge smiles and the young woman started jumping up and down and clapping her hands with excitement.

Another young woman told Jamie that people stare because she has “a tall nose and big eyes.” We assume she meant that as a compliment.

We have another theory.

Mandarin Gourmet, out on Los Osos Valley Road, was our favorite Chinese restaurant in San Luis Obispo. Our favorite waitress, a young Chinese immigrant, once told us that Jamie looks exactly like a famous Chinese actress, which seemed very odd because there are no Asians swimming in Jamie’s gene pool.

But who knows? The Chinese also eat live worms and scorpions, so one never knows why they do the things they do.

Yeah, we’re sometimes morons.

When we arrived at the Beijing train station at 5:45 a.m. it was already packed full of thousands of Chinese, all screaming into their cell phones. It was cacophony on steroids.

We worked our way through the crowd to the taxi queue. I had the name and address of the hotel written down on a piece of paper and showed it to about 20 different taxi drivers. Some of them claimed they didn’t speak English, others rudely waved us away. We were getting very frustrated and couldn’t figure out why none of them would give us a ride.

One driver finally indicated that he would take us to our hotel, the Marriott Great Wall Beijing, and motioned for us to put our bags in his trunk.

We climbed into the back seat of the cab. He turned on the meter, we left the station, drove about 100 yards and pulled into a driveway. The driver indicated that we had arrived at our destination.

Holy crap. We had no idea that our hotel was so close to the train station. The ride was so short that the fare hadn’t even risen from the minimum 13 yuans.

I asked the driver what the fare was. He said, “Twenty.” I gratefully handed him a 50 yuan note (about $8) and went into the hotel.

No wonder an entire fleet of taxis turned us down. There’s nothing a taxi driver hates more than waiting in a long queue and then getting a short fare. And it would be tough to find a shorter fare than ours.

Good lord, man, Charles Manson’s family took better-looking mugshots. Believe it or not, we felt even worse than we looked. If that’s possible.

We walked into the Beijing Marriott at 6:00 in the morning and tried to check in. This is, of course, far earlier than rational guests check out of hotels, so no rooms were available.

The director of guest relations walked over and introduced himself. He may have taken one look at us from across the lobby and decided that he needed to intervene because there were some very smelly homeless people in his hotel.

Everything changed when he found out we had taken the train from Moscow. He showed us to some seats in the lounge, brought us coffee and tea, asked if there was anything else he could do for us, and said they would get a room ready for us as soon as one was available.

While we were sitting in the lounge catching up on a week’s worth of email, the manager of the hotel came over, introduced himself and asked somewhat incredulously, “Did you really take the train all the way from Moscow?”

By 9 a.m. they had a room ready. We went upstairs and took our first showers in a week. They were long and they were hot because getting all the dirt off took some concentrated scrubbing. I shaved. My god, we felt human again. Then we went back downstairs to have our first real meal in a week.

As we walked through the lobby, the hotel manager spotted us, walked over to greet us with a big smile on his face and said, “You both look a lot better … not that you looked bad. That’s not what I’m saying.”

Yes, it was. That’s exactly what he was saying. And we completely understood.

Let me say it again: The train trip across Siberia was a once in a lifetime experience.

And now that we’ve done it once, we never have to do it again.

We’re back on board the train after our four-hour break in Zabaykalsk during which work crews changed the wheels on the train so that they’ll work on China’s narrower gauge railroad.

As we boarded, Rustam said that customs and immigration control would now take another three hours to check everyone on the train.

First a tough-looking hombre with a drug-sniffing dog came through the train. While the uniformed agent stood outside our door, his dog ran into our car, sniffed around quickly, found nothing and automatically ran to the next compartment to repeat the process. The agent said not a word, but gave us a look that said, This is a great job. The dog does all the work and I get to stand here scaring the hell out of weak kneed Americanski tourists. How the hell did these clowns win the Cold War?

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look he gave us.

Then a very attractive, but severe young woman in a sleek, formfitting uniform came to our door and demanded our passports. Think Lilith on the old Frasier TV show. She was all business. She asked for Jamie’s passport first, ordered her to stand up, looked over the documents very carefully, then turned to the photo page. She stared at Jamie, then stared just as carefully at the passport photo and repeated the process three or four more times. I’m pretty sure she was thinking, What happened? This woman has cute hair in her passport photo, but now she looks like she washed it with some crazy waterless shampoo.                                                                                                                                                              

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look she gave her.

She finally slipped Jamie’s passport into her briefcase and turned to me. Same process, but I swear she took twice as long looking back and forth between me and my passport. Then she gave me a look that said, If it weren’t for this chick with the strange dirty hair, I could get myself some of this hunky Americanski dude.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look she gave me.

Then she put my passport in her briefcase and left. Brokenhearted, I’m sure.

A quarter hour or so later a much older, even more severe uniformed man stood in our doorway and in a very heavy Russian accent started demanding answers.

“How much Chinese and Russian money do you have?”

Hell, man, I thought he wanted an exact count, so I pulled out my wallet and started counting out my 2400 rubles. Please keep in mind that 2400 rubles is no laughing matter. It’s almost eighty American dollars and the thought entered my mind that I might have been in violation of some arcane Russian currency law by carrying around a wad of cash that size.

He gave me a look that said, You freakin’ moron. I’m looking for Russian drug lords carrying billions of ill-gotten euros and you’re showing me your pathetic eighty dollars? Sit down, you Americanski idiot.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look he gave me.

Another quarter hour or so passed and another very large, very tough-looking uniformed man came to our compartment and ordered us out so that he could go over it with a fine tooth comb.

He gave Jamie a look that said, Honey, I may be going over this compartment with a fine tooth comb, but from the looks of your hair it could really use a fine tooth comb. Or a comb of any kind. Do yourself a real favor and wash that mop with real shampoo as soon as you get to Beijing.

Jamie may disagree, but that’s what I got out of the look he gave her.

Another hour or so passed and the sexy little passport chick who was so hot for me came back. She looked at Jamie, opened her passport and said in the cutest little Russian accent, “Jamie Leen deYonk?”

Jamie said, “Yes” and her passport was immediately handed back to her.

Then she looked at me, and with an undeniable sexual tension thick in the air, she stumbled as she tried to say my name, “Jamesie Leen … Jamesie Lee deYonk?”

I said, “Yes” and my passport was handed back to me along with a tiny slip of paper on which she had written, “Lose the chick with the dirty hair and meet me in the cabooski.”

OK, there was no note, but I consider that a mere technicality. Jamie may disagree, but I think that’s what a note would have said if the agent hadn’t feared running afoul of her superiors at the KGB.

Another hour has passed and we’re still sitting here. No sign of any progress.

UPDATE: We’re finally pulling out of the Zabaykalsk train station seven hours and forty-five minutes after we arrived.

Dos vadanya, my sweet little passport chick, until we meet again.

Irina and Evgeny rented a “mommy room” at the train station so Sophie could take a nap. We stayed down in the waiting room and Jamie decided she needed to use the ladies’ room.

She came back about 30 seconds later.

“That was fast.”

“The toilet is a hole in the floor.”

I just laughed and said, “Welcome to Asia.”

A hour or so passed. I was getting bored and began looking around at the various characters gathered in the waiting room.

“Hey, look over there” I said quietly, “I think those teenage girls are staring at you.”

“I think they’re laughing at me,” she said glumly. “They were in the ladies’ room and saw that I wouldn’t use the hole in the floor.”

Ssssh. Listen closely and I think you’ll be able to hear the soft, siren call of the Marriott Beijing. Can you hear it? It’s saying, “Jaaaaaamie. Come to me, Jaaaaaamie.”

We were told that some first class cars have one shower per car and that others have one shower shared between two compartments. That’s not exactly the standard we’re used to, but we keep telling each other that this is an adventure, damn it, an adventure.

Turns out there’s no shower and just two very small bathrooms to be shared by all ten luxurious first class cabins and all 20 first class passengers in our car.

Each bathroom has a toilet, a very tiny sink, and a strange contraption that’s supposed to function as a faucet. Water comes out of it, but only in a manner of speaking.

Whatever you do, however, do not drink that water. There’s a sign above the faucet that makes it very clear that this water is not to be consumed.

So one could argue, if one had a very positive outlook on life, that this train really isn’t much different than our accommodations at the Renaissance Hotel in St Petersburg where they also warned us not to drink the water.

Jamie was smart enough to foresee this possibility and she stocked up on baby wipes before we left. So while all the other genteel, worldly sophisticates in the other luxurious first class compartments are stinking to high heaven, we’re as clean as can be.

(I think I could solve our temporary financial problems by selling the baby wipes to all the other passengers, but Jamie would rather be clean than eat.)

UPDATE: Denise and Lars also brought along baby wipes, so we’re happy to report that our friends also smell delightful.

UPDATE #2: Jamie wants to send thanks out to our friend Traci Wilson who gave us a small bottle of waterless shampoo. I haven’t tried it because Jamie’s hair doesn’t look any cleaner to me.

UPDATE #3: Note to our friend Diane Fleming: Despite using that waterless shampoo, Jamie has not received a single compliment on her hair aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.