DENVER -- A University of Colorado student has been quarantined in a Beijing hotel as Chinese authorities try to contain the H1N1 flu outbreak.

Thomas Spradling told the Boulder Daily Camera he was lounging in the lobby of his hotel in the center of Beijing Monday when men in white hazmat suits came for him and his mother.

Spradling, who does not speak Chinese, said he and other hotel guests were taken to a four-star hotel in an ambulance. The two have been in quarantine ever since.

"We were pretty freaked out," Spradling told the Camera Wednesday from Beijing. "The doctors in the hazmat suits had bags of medical supplies that looked like syringes. It was especially freaky because no one spoke English."

Authorities told Spradling that he had sat within three rows of someone with H1N1 flu-like symptoms on their flight to Beijing.

The two have been placed in quarantine and are scheduled to be released Saturday.

Spradling said he and his mother were forced to put on masks. They were greeted at the quarantine hotel by a half-dozen doctors. He told the Camera they've had their temperatures taken twice daily.

The CU graduate student said he plans to stay in Asia for the summer, touring art galleries.

The first cases of swine flu were discovered in Mexico and the United States, before cases started showing up in Asia.

Spradling said the experience hasn't been all that bad -- with the exception of the food.

"Being a recent college student, I’m used to bad food, but this is definitely inedible," he told the Camera.

Calif. Students Stuck In China Due To Flu

A group of ninth-graders and teachers from a California private school have also been quarantined in China after seven of them tested positive for swine flu on a school trip.

Caroline Callaway, a spokeswoman for Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, said six students and one teacher have been diagnosed with the virus and are recovering in a hospital in Yichang.

Three other students and a teacher are in the hospital with other illnesses. And the bulk of the group -- 25 students and five teachers -- has been quarantined in a nearby hotel since Thursday.

Each student is being held in a different room with a television and phone. Hotel employees make food runs for the students, who are not allowed to have personal contact with anyone -- not even each other.

"In the hotel, they're kind of shouting across the hotel and calling each other," Callaway said on Wednesday.

The group of 35 ninth-graders left for China on June 2. Before the quarantine, they climbed the Great Wall, explored the immense plazas of the Forbidden City and visited the Terra Cotta Warriors in the inland city of Xi'an.

The group had embarked on a river cruise to Three Gorges Dam when a handful of students and one teacher started feeling sick and saw a doctor on board.