Re: [78attendees] WARNING !!! Re: Maastricht to Brussels-Nat-Aero, Sat

> If this was some place in the US, I could easily find a cheap hotel chain 
> nearby (like I did in Anaheim). In Europe, it's a little more difficult, 
> but still doable (thanks, Google Earth). In China, I have no idea where to 
> even look. Sure, I can find a list of cheap hotels in Beijing, but I have 
> no idea where they are in relation to the meeting venue, or whether the 
> staff would speak English. The warning to have your destination written 
> down in Chinese, because the taxi drivers don't speak English doesn't 
> inspire confidence either.
> For most business meetings, all this doesn't matter. You either have a 
> host that helps you out, or your Chinese sales office helps you out. For 
> an IETF meeting, we don't really have either of these.
Just as a data point, I was in Beijing for the PPSP workshop at the 
beginning of the summer, and was able to come up with google maps to/from my 
hotel, which was not the conference hotel, with enough Chinese that I could 
hand the maps to a cab driver.
I'm not a native, but my impression is that one of the things you're paying 
for at high-end hotels in China is staff that speaks English - but I've 
never stayed at a hotel in China where no one spoke English; it might be 
that just one or two people who spoke English, and everyone else would go 
fetch someone when I needed to answer a question.
The only real point of confusion for me was that I didn't know what terminal 
I was DEPARTING from, when exiting China. Both Star Alliance and OneWorld 
fly out of the massive Terminal 3 (read more about this at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_airport), but I didn't know that, and 
it took a little while at the hotel to figure out what to tell the cab 
driver.
I put the address given at the IETF website ("29 Zizhuyuan Road Beijing 
100089 China") into Google Maps, and then zoomed out - looks like we're in 
Haidian District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidian_District, "the 
university district"). If you include the district in your searches for 
hotels, that will at least keep you from being at the other end of 
Beijing...
Spencer 

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