We learned that the address was pointing us into a back alley, where there where lots of appartments without any numbers, and therefore difficult to find. We tried to communicate directly, but as you see... talk about lost in translation :
As I said earlier, google doesnt work, so that means google maps/ translate doesn’t work ;) you can’t copy the text and paste it into google translation and no one of us could speak Chinese. And, in Beijing, most people don’t speak a word English. I could easily talk Norwegian back, it didn’t matter.
anyhow, we managed to find a guy, showed him pictures of our conversations with the host, tried to use the universal language, and luckily he pointed us to the general direction. We had a picture of the door, so we had to go look for that
Finally we found it
What we like about this is what I talked about earlier, it feels authentic and is more authentic that staying at a Hotell. Of course, the good comes with the bad, you struggle with communication, and the facilities are not up to what I would called Western standards, but it suffices, and this is how local people live.
This is where we lived, the general area:
This is from another genius app called maps.me
You download in advance the city you want to travel to, and navigate by GPS
Finally at the HQ, we could throw of our travelling bags, and give the kids some playing time and Fruits: