China arrival day

We made it to China! So many answered prayers already. We made our super short connection in Chicago. By God's amazing providence our flight from Charlotte landed 6 gates down from where our Beijing flight was taking off, in.the.same.terminal. Amazing. On the flight to Beijing we were almost the only Caucasians on this flight and definitely the only ones with blonde hair. The beginning of culture shock. 😂

 

 

There are no pics of us after the flight because we looked somewhat haggard. The flight was pretty good though - just long. We watched a bunch of movies and the kids were able to sleep about an hour and a half ish which gave them the stamina to make it to a regular bedtime. The long long flight did make us pretty apprehensive about the flight home with one more. 

 

We landed after about a 12 hour flight, shorter than we thought because "we caught good tailwinds," whatever that means. We deplaned in Beijing, went through immigration in the line for foreigners, collected our checked bags (they all made it,another praise!), went through customs, and met up with our guide that was waiting for us with a sign. 😃 

 

 

Our agency arranged the transportation and everything so we hopped on a bus for our hotel. 

 

Our hotel in Beijing seems great so far. They had a bunch of Christmas lights out front and it appears that they love Santa in China. There was some kind of party at our hotel last night with a Chinese Santa who gave candy to each of the kids. 

 

 

We got checked in and settled in our rooms and then headed out for a quick dinner. We basically ate at the first place we could find which was a type of Irish pub. We had some pizza (yay China) and headed back for early bedtimes given that we'd been up for something like 27 hours. 

 

So thankful to be here!