Saturday, September 16, 2006

Hello from Beijing! We arrived yesterday, Friday, in good spirits. The flight wasn’t too bad. At first Tom and I didn’t have seats next to each other, but a nice gentleman traded seats with Tom and we were able to sit together and with some of our new friends who are also adopting.

Fourteen people from our group got bumped from our flight and had to take today’s flight. They all arrived a few hours ago looking very exhausted! I can’t imagine how stressful that must have been after all of the anticipation, to be bumped from the flight to China.

We were supposed to go to the Great Wall of China today, but because of the passengers who were bumped, we altered our itinerary and went to the Forbidden City. We wanted to wait until the entire group was here to do the Great Wall of China! We also got to spend the afternoon taking a rickshaw tour of the city, which was really cool! So far, that has been the highlight of the trip (OK, we’ve only been here 24 hours, but it really was a highlight!)

Our hotel is great! Our tour guide, Rose, is fabulous! The weather is good, warm and humid, but the smog is terrible. We hope the Hunan province is not as smoggy as Beijing.

We got information about Zoe today. We found out that she is crawling, she eats rice and noodle soup (in addition to formula and rice cereal) She loves to be outside and she sometimes has a quick temper (after all, the girls from Hunan province are called the spicy girls) We will be meeting her at 10:30 am on Monday (we are very excited), but prayers are still appreciated.

We will have more to add tomorrow after we fly to the Hunan province. We are not sure yet, if we will be able to get our pictures from today online (we are having some technical difficulties) but we will try!

Tom and Kathy