OK, so if you are reading this, that means that I can blog from China, which I wasn’t sure we would be able to do!  I do know that while we can received emails, we cannot send them through Outlook.  We will try tomorrow from the email web-site instead of relying on Outlook.

We made it to the airport with only a minor distraction.  SOMEONE forgot to bring their contact case and glasses.  No comments on who the offender is, but sufice it to say that it would have been a REALLY long week of Kelly leading a blind man through China.

Here we all are at Dayton International:

From Dayton we went to Chicago with a FOUR hour layover (did you know that Chili’s serves breakfast?  It wasn’t First Watch, but it was pretty good.)  Then we were on our way to Beijing, 13 hours over the North Pole.  Here are the happy travelers:

Understood that was at the BEGINNING of the trip!  It was a VERY long trip … it felt much longer than the trip to Vietnam did.  Part of it might have been because we were traveling during the day, but part of it was that the movie/video option was pretty unimpressive.  I had never seen “Young Frankinstien” so that held my attention for about 1 1/2 hours of the trip, but after that I was pretty bored as was the rest of the crew.  Add to that the fact that about a half hour before the flight was over, Brittany started throwing up!  Then we hit turbulance on the way into Beijing, so it only made matters worse!  See the lady in the background of this picture in the grey shirt?  When Brittany started puking, SHE started puking also.  Nice ….  Somehow we cleared the heath desk on the way through the airport.  As of the writing of this, she is STILL throwing up, so please pray for her.  We have a busy day tomorrow and she needs to be a part of it!  We prayed for her before she went to bed and with a full nights sleep, we are believing she will be much better tomorrow. 

When we landed in Beijing (here is the Beijing airport):

We were met by our guide.  She really is a lovely young lady, although maybe just a might TOO helpful????  When Brittany was throwing up in the van ride to the hotel, our guide was throwing back baby wipes like she was on an episode of Minute to Win It!  But, she has been very helpful.  Here, Kelly and she are getting to know each other:

Beijing, quite frankly, is no different than most American cities.  Feels like you have never left home.  Sure, it has it’s typical Asian store fronts and people riding bikes:

But there is a lot of really pretty new construction going on and everything is significantly more “organized” than Vietnam was.

We are stayin in the Holiday Inn, Ledo, which isn’t a bad little place.  Here is the lobby:

the hallway to our room:

and our room:

Note Brittany already under the covers!

Since Kelly wasn’t feeling good and Brittany was … well … you know, Taylor and I decided to head out and spend some time on the streets.  Here is a cute little news stand right up from the hotel:

Along with a rather run down apartment building that is right up the street from us:

I’m not sure why Kelly went by the Croc’s outlet store before we left because you can buy Crocs right off of the hood of people’s cars!

While I was looking at the local frut and vegitable stand …

Taylor was, imagine, looking at earings!!

She and I ate in a nice little Irish Pub across the street from the hotel (she IS 18 now, remember!  Although, don’t worry mom and dad.  She had Orange juice.  She was angling for Sprint, but we had some communication issues with our waitress).  I almost had to sell Taylor at the pub as the didn’t take a credit card and I had left my money in the hotel.  Luckily, eventhough the staff may not have been overly fluent in English, they were VERY nice and let Taylor and I run back to the hotel and get some money.

Overall, we are here and things are going pretty well.

COMMUNICATION

Just one note on communication here from China.  I had set up multiple ways to communicate back home and so far, all but one of them has worked perfectly.  Skype is a dream and how any of us lived before Sykpe is beyond me.  This evening we video called our kids and Koreen’s house and spent all of one penny.  Beautiful.  While our hotel’s version of “high-speed” and Skype version of “high-speed” are miles apart, it did work and was great!

I am also using www.ipipi.com to text back and forth.  It, too, worked JUST as advertised and I am very happy to have an extremely low cost option for texting back and forth when we are out with just our cell phones!

If you have any questions, please let me know!

Cameron