A busy day!

First of all, it appears that I can't post directly to the blog, however, Daniel has things set up so that I can email the blog and it should show up.  So hopefully, that will work.  It may look different but at least it's something.

I'll start back on Thursday when we left, our flight out of Indy was delayed and finally arrived 2 1/2 hours late which in turn made us miss our connecting flight to Tokyo.  Northwest was rescheduled us for the same flight on the next day which just wasn't going to work for us...that would mean that we would miss the only day we had in Beijing and we'd be leaving right away to go to Nanning.  So finally, we got a little insight from a United Airlines worker who told us that there was a flight out of Minneapolis to L.A. and then onto Beijing so after a lot of coercing, Northwest finally scheduled us on those flights and we were on our way.

We arrived in Beijing this morning at 5am.  Even after 31 hours of traveling and very little sleep, we felt good and energetic.  We made it through the quarantine checkpoint without any issue though if something comes up, we could still be quarantined up to 7 days.  Our adoption coordinator met us at the airport with a van and driver and we were on our way in no time.  We arrived at the hotel at 6:40 and had time to shower and get breakfast before our group met to go sightseeing at 9am.

We finally were able to meet the other three families in our group.  They all seem very nice and I think we'll get along fine. 

The Forbidden City was first on the list.  We, along with at least half a million other people walked through the Forbidden City together.  It was quite a crowd.  All of the locals carry umbrellas to help shade them from the sun which was hot but not any hotter than Indiana on a hot day.  So of course, you are always getting poked in the head by other people's umbrellas...there were a lot of people there!!!!!!

Then it was off to the Great Wall of China.  The entire wall was 4000 miles long, though a lot of it is now gone from neglect.  We were able to climb a section of it.  It's not an easy task--especially when you're feeling a little worn out anyway!

We got new information about Katie today also.  She takes 6 bottles with formula mixed with rice cereal a day...including one at midnight...I can see a change coming, probably not right away but we can start working towards that.  Her nickname is Qui Qui, pronounced, "choo choo", Sam will like that!

So we're exhausted and are hoping for a quiet night's sleep!  We leave in the morning for Nanning!