We Made It!

After a long day of travel, we finally made it to Beijing. We left Wednesday morning and lost the night in between Wednesday and Thursday, so it is already Friday, May 2. Thankfully, the flight ended up being an hour shorter than predicted, a total of 12 1/2 hours. I don't think any of us slept more than two hours. But we kept ourselves somewhat entertained. They were showing movies and serving food periodically, so that helped. But it never got dark! It was neat though, when we flew over the Hudson Bay, the north pole, and Russia!

We landed just before 3pm and made it to the hotel at 5pm. Ever since we have been so wiped out. It doesn't help that there are people everywhere and the air is really heavy from humidity. We haven't seen sun in the 24 hours we have been here either. Its hazy everywhere we go. This has just added to our tiredness. As soon as we got our rooms yesterday we crashed and slept all night. But our rooms are even humid. The air conditioning isn't great so its been hot since we got off the plane. It makes you want to take cold showers all the time. But at least it is only 75 degrees on top of the humidity instead of 90 like we thought. Or at least we think that is the temperature, its hard to read celcius.

We went sightseeing this morning to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. And all the rumors are true, the people here wanted to take pictures with us everywhere we went. We felt like celebrities! The little girls in our group were the most popular. People pointed and stared at us on our entire tour. We couldn't get away from the crowds either. Everyone here moves at a much faster pace than we are used to also. It was a race to get on the elevators in the airport and the street crossing is really scary. Bicycles are everywhere and cars don't seem to be too concerned about pedestrians. Our guide just told us, cross when the Chinese cross!

But we have been walking all morning, difficult when we are extremely tired and it's difficult to breathe. We didn't realize that the walk from one end of the tour to the other was a few miles. The number of courtyards and palaces is amazing. They kept going and going. I think they said that there were nearly 10,000 rooms. This afternoon we were supposed to see and acrobat show, but I think we are going to skip. We are going to stay back at the hotel and rest instead. Jet lag is wearing on us still. Tommorrow we are going to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace. We are really excited for the Great Wall!

There are about 11 other families here in Beijing with us. One of them gets their daughter this afternoon! On Sunday, the rest of us are traveling to our provinces, ours is Guangdong. Then we will get Connor on Monday afternoon. We were given more information on him when we arrived yesterday. His nickname is Xing Xing! We also learned that he is afraid of cows. Isn't that cute! We wonder where he has seen a cow that he would be afraid of. Hopefully he isn't afraid of the dogs.

Thank you for praying for our safe travels! Only 3 more days until we get Connor!