We Made It!!

Well, we made it into Beijing yesterday afternoon after 13 and 1/2 hours in the air from Newark, NJ direct to Beijing. We flew over the North pole, that was cool but all the shades on the plane were closed because people were trying to sleep. The kids were pretty excited because they had so many new experiences: first time flying, we saw the New York City skyline as we landed in Newark, we could even see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from the distance.

Beijing is a city of 13 million people, for perspective I believe New York City is around 6-8 million people. So, we are currently surrounded by lots of people, cars honking, lots of tall apartment buildings. The people are very nice and helpful. We have to boil the water in our hotel before drinking it because of sanitation. Each room comes equipped with a pot to boil the water in. Other than that, our hotel seems like any other nice hotel. As soon as we got here we were exhausted because we had been up for around 24 hours. We went to bed early, then we were all awake at around 1:30 am and ate a snack and tried to go back to sleep. We are 13 hours ahead of Kansas time, so jet lag is an issue.

We had a great day today. Our travel group has 19 families in it but only 5 families were here since last night. The rest of the families are arriving this afternoon and evening. We went with four other families for a walk through some shops and to the local grocery store to buy bottled water. Our guides were not with us today, so we were kind of on our own. With the other families we decided to venture out today and took taxis to a tourist site called the Temple of Heaven. The picture for today is from that trip. The little boy in the picture is NOT our daughter so that no one gets confused. The Chinese people love blond hair and blue eyes. Anna was quite a celebrity today with literally ton's of requests to have her picture taken with people. Jairus and Josh got several requests as well. Once one person got the courage to ask to take a picture with the kids and others saw we would allow it, then many others would surround them to get a picture. The kids were great sports and I think actually enjoyed all the attention. Getting to the temple of heaven was no problem because the hotel got us taxi's to take us there, getting back on the other hand was an adventure without speaking the language. We just showed the driver our hotel key that had the address on it and once we found a driver who new where it was we finally got back to the hotel. Unfortunately, one of the taxis took two of the other couples with us on a wild goose chase for over an hour before finally getting them close to the hotel--it was kind of scary for them but they made it back safe and sound. The rest of our trip we will have guides with us all the time.

Here's the basics of our itinerary:
Saturday-touring the Forbidden City and Tienanmen Square and the Summer Palace
Sunday- International Church service and Great Wall of China tour.
Monday- We fly to the Hebei province and will meet Abigail Rose (Guo Jin)-she will stay with us from that point forward.
Tuesday-Thursday --Civil Affairs Appointments and sight seeing/shopping in Hebei Province
Friday-Fly to Guangzhou
Saturday-Medical exam for Abigail and the rest of that next week will have several meetings and times for paperwork to finalize the adoption and meet US immigration requirements.
Friday the 14th we will fly home from Hong Kong.

Blessings beyond measure to all of you!