Beijing!

Hi All! Well, here we are in Beijing. We made it!!! Although, to be honest, I wasn't sure that we were going to. Turns out the reason that our flight was delayed was because the pilot got in really late the night before and is required to have a certain amount of sleep before flying again. Well, we ended up taking Air China and got our Chinese experience started a little earlier than usual. The seats were pretty tight and cramped and VERY VERY hot! Now you know Dan being the walking furnace was pretty uncomfortable, but he was a trooper. As soon as the drinks were served, it suddenly became a flying mall! They broke out the carts with the cartons of cigarettes and perfumes and money was flying everywhere. Now this PROBABLY happens all the time on international flights, but since Dan and I are novices, it was pretty funny. We both slept on the plane a total of 2 hours so we were pretty tired when we got here at about 6pm local time. We got our stuff together and apparently the other 2 families had been delayed as well so they only got there about 30 minutes before us! The hotel is BEAUTIFUL! The room service is crazy fast. We got in and slept until about 5:30am and got ready for breakfast. They had a great breakfast buffet downstairs where I ate noodles, steamed veggies and fried rice. Dan was a little more adventurous than I was and ate sausage and rice. He also made best friends with anyone that would bring him coffee. Right now, we're back in the room getting ready to head out to the Great Wall and later on tonight we are going to see a Chinese Acrobat show! I don't have any pictures yet, but apparently it's pretty hard to add pictures here for some reason, so Brenda said she would help out with that (Thanks Brenda!). Hopefully we'll be able to post some great pictures when we get back from the touring around today!