We're here!!

Hello everyone. Wow . . . that was the longest day ever! Our flight left Toronto airport at 8:00 am (actually it was about an hour late but still gave us tons of time to catch our connecting flight in Vancouver. We boarded the plane finally at 4:30 pm (January 30)and touched down in Beijing at 4:00 pm local time (January 31). Isn't that insane? I think the flight was about 11 1/2 hours from Vancouver to Beijing and honestly about halfway, I had had enough. Did I mention how long that flight is? Our guide, Shirley, met us at the airport and everything went very smoothly there. It was about an hour bus ride from the airport to our hotel because of rush hour - and I mean rush hour! Traffic is crazy here. :) We then checked in, organized our luggage, had a bite to eat at the hotel here and finally crashed about 9:00 pm. We slept great . . . until about 2:30 am and we've been awake ever since. It's strange because you're so exhausted and think you could sleep for days but 5 1/2 hours later we were wide awake. I think our clocks are a bit messed up. So here I am blogging at 4:30 am (Thursday morning - not sure what happened to Wednesday). I hope I can figure this all out because Blogger is all in Chinese.

Our wake up call this morning will be at 5:00 - obviously no need for that. We're going to meet downstairs for breakfast and then board the bus at 6:20 to go back to the airport. What a whirlwind! We catch our plane to go to Guangzhou at 8:45 and I think it's a 3 hour flight. By the time we get there, we'll have just enough time to throw our bags in our room and we'll be out the door again to get Samara. Can you believe that? It's so soon now. And the funny thing is that it still doesn't seem real. I suppose it's gonna take having her in our arms finally to make it very, very real. We were looking out our window last night saying, "I can't believe we're in China!"

We had a chance to call home quickly last night. It was nice to talk to the kids (and you too Peggy). They sound like they're having a lot of fun.

Thank you to everyone who has left comments and emails. When I opened my sympatico account this morning, I had 48 messages! Awesome. It's so nice to hear from everyone.

For those of you who had problems leaving a comment, this is how you do it: Underneath this post it will say 5 comments or however many comments there are for this post. Just click on that and you should be able to leave a comment without a blogger account by just signing in as anonymous.