July 7,2009
We made it safely to Beijing! We left DBU at 4:30am Monday morning, flew out of DFW at 7:45am, and arrived in Seattle at 9:34am. We left Seattle at 2:00pm and arrived in Beijing around 4:30pm on Tuesday afternoon China time (3:30am Texas time). The flight turned out only to be 11 hours opposed to the 19 hours we thought it was going to be and it wasn't bad at all! I slept pretty much the whole Seattle flight (3 ½ hours) and 6 hours on the Beijing flight. We all ended up sitting by ourselves on the Beijing flight since we all picked to sit by a window. We each had an empty seat next to us so I was able to lay down which was really nice. On the Beijing flight they fed us two meals: dinner and breakfast (it was surprisingly pretty good) and snacks in between. We each had a blanket, pillow, and personalized T.V. Screens to play games, listen to music, look at maps as you travel, and watch movies. I watched Chronicles of Narnia: Prince of Caspian and almost all of Sleepless in Seattle. When we arrived in Beijing our contact, Grace, picked us up in a van and took us to our place and provided dinner for us. She also made us a welcome pack full of menus for quarantine week haha since we can't go anywhere really, maps, contact information, subway pass, and our spending money for food/travel for our trip. I really like Grace, she is hilarious! She will be a lot of fun to be around. She will be planning our weekend trips and touring with us! We are unpacking our rooms right now. It is close to 10pm here (9am Texas). I am rooming with a sweet girl named Melissa. We share a lot of the same interests and we get along really well. Our room is basically a hotel room. We have two twin beds, a nice size closet, a bathroom, a balcony, desk, refrigerator, chest, and a coffee table with chairs. We are praising God that we don't have to be under "official" government quarantine so thank you for your prayers for that because it is definitely a blessing! It was funny though at the beginning and end of the Beijing flight the quarantine crew came in with masks and goggles and took our temperature with these things that looked like grocery scanner guns. I wish I would have gotten a picture, but it probably wouldn't have been the best idea. Now, we do have to be under quarantine, but we are able to stay in our hotel rooms (which is where we will be staying all six weeks) and inside of our building. However, if we go outside we have to wear masks. I think we scared quite a few people while wearing our masks tonight haha. In our building we have a church, convenient store, a massage clinic, a ping pong room, an exercise room, a billiards room, a washer & dryer thankfully (we thought we were going to have to wash our clothes by hand), a dance studio, and a gymnasium with a tennis court, a basketball court, and squash courts. It is very nice! The building where we are staying is right across the street from where we are teaching and they just got a new school building so we will be the first to teach there. Grace said we should be able to go over to see the school Friday and we can set up our rooms. We will start teaching Monday! I'm so excited about this whole experience! I can't believe how nice everything they are providing for us is! Complete blessing! I took pictures of our flight, our place, and the city of Beijing so I hope to get those up with this post! I'm going to finish unpacking and I think I will be ready for bed! It has been a long, but fun day! I can't wait to meet my kids! Tomorrow and the rest of the quarantine week we will be mostly working on finishing up lesson plans and catching up on sleep. Oh also I am unable to get on facebook here so if I don't respond to you this is why. I still can't believe I'm in China! AH so exciting!!!! Thank you all for keeping me in your prayers and I look forward to continue sharing this amazing experience!

"Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Philippians 1:6