We Arrived!!

We arrived at the Beijing airport at 4:30 AM local time. The flight was only 11 hours 40 minutes not 12 hours 40 minutes. WOW , it was quit miserable. very tight seats, not very clean and I (Rebecca) got sick on the plan for the first half of the flight. We tried to sleep on the plan, not very successfully. So as you can imagine, we were so tired by the time we arrived. the weather is warm and humid. It was about 80 degrees at 4:30 am as we got off the plane. And cloudy today, but we are so glad to see the sun out. the whole time on the plan it was dark out, and the flight attendants kept turning out the lights on the plan. I guess they we trying to keep us on a schedule of some sort. :) The Beijing Capital Airport is huge and clean and beautiful and pretty empty while we were there.
After going through check points and turning in a little health declaration form (swine flu) and collected our luggage, Rosa from America World was waiting for us, walked us to a van right outside and drove us the our hotel (Best Western Premier Beijing). Very nice hotel, very clean. All the people here have been very kind so far. We came up to the room, ordered room service (the food on the plane was kinda funky) and took a nice long nap……feeling sooooo much better.
We plan to go walking around some today. We miss everyone (I totally miss my dogs, I didn’t say goodbye to them) :( Jennifer give them hugs for me, thanks. We are doing fine and will update you tomorrow. Love to you all.

This is us leaving our house at 8:30 PM Wednesday night, US time.

This is the view of Beijing outside our hotel window.