In Beijing

In Beijing

Hi, everybody!  We're having some troubles connecting to the internet, so we'll see if this works.  For some reason, we're able to connect to our Yahoo email but not Facebook or Blogger, so we're trying to update Blogger via email.  This morning we got up around 5:30 am feeling refreshed after getting a night's sleep.  We took the hotel's free shuttle to the airport and got there really early for our 9:00 flight.  We were glad we got there early to get everything figured out.  The 3-hour flight seemed quite short compared to our long flight yesterday.  We got to the Beijing airport around noon.  After going through immigration and customs and picking up our baggage, we exchanged some money and then waited for our guide, George, who was supposed to meet us there.  We were starting to get a little nervous because nobody was there for us, but then a man showed up with a sign with our name on it.  We quickly realized he was not George and he didn't speak any English, but we went with him anyway since we didn't really have any other options, and he gave us a ride to our hotel, which was about a 45-minute ride from the airport.  We figured that the guy was just some driver that the travel agency hired since they didn't have a guide to meet us at the time.  Luckily, they speak some English in the hotel so we were able to get checked into our room and later they helped us call the cell phone number we had for George.  Jeff talked to him, and it turns out that he's actually not going to be our guide, but he was still helpful.  A lady named Cindy will be our guide and she called us in our hotel this afternoon, so we felt better after we talked to her and found that we will be meeting her at 8:00 in our hotel lobby in the morning.

We pretty much spent the whole afternoon/evening in our hotel room.  We had some soup and mac & cheese that we brought from home for lunch.  We didn't bring any utensils except for some baby forks and spoons for TongJie, so we ate with baby spoons.  The hotel provided two bottles of bottled water, so there was one for each of us.  Also there is a pot with a hotplate to boil water, so we've been using that.  We were really tired this afternoon, so we took a nap around 4:00 (1:00 am for you guys) and didn't wake up 'til 8:00.  Then we ventured out this evening to a convenience store that's nearby our hotel and bought some more bottled water.  We don't want to get dehydrated.  The weather here in Beijing has been nice today, despite the smog.  It's hot but not humid like it was in Hong Kong.  It reminds us of a summer day in Wenatchee.  Right now it's about 9:45 pm (6:45 am for you guys), so we'll try to go to bed pretty soon.  Like I mentioned, we'll meet Cindy at 8:00 tomorrow morning for our Beijing tour.  We're pretty excited for that, but not as excited as we are to meet TongJie on Monday!

I have some pictures to post, but I don't even know if this weird email update is going to work, so I'll try to post this first and then maybe add some pictures later.  Thanks for all of your prayers, and we miss everybody back at home.  We're always thinking about what time it is at home and trying to figure out what everybody is probably doing.  Hopefully we'll be able to post more tomorrow!