Run, Masyrs, Run

China here we come!  Today, our long and greatly anticipated journey to Faith finally began.  We were scheduled to take a flight from Los Angeles at 9:37 AM.  We got to the airport two hours before our scheduled departure (which wasn't quite early enough for Evan), checked in our bags and went to the gate.  After waiting for 30 minutes or so, we noticed that the flight changed gates and was now delayed due to poor weather conditions in San Francisco.  At first, it was a 30 minute delay, which was not big deal.  When the 30 minutes turned into 2 hours, we were pacing the floors.  When we finally arrived at San Francisco, we had only 20 minutes to catch our connecting flight, which was in a different terminal.  Yikes!!  We ran and ran, hoping we would make it.  Even Noah was running fast!  We were the last ones to board the plane.  What a relief!

The flight from San Francisco was long but rather uneventful.  We met several other families that were traveling to China to adopt as well, including three families from our same adoption agency.  After the nearly 12 hour flight, we were met by our guides and went to our hotel.  Once we checked in, we made a made a brief shopping trip to pick up bottled waters and other essentials.  The store, Carrefour (similar to a Wal-Mart Supercenter), was extremely busy and crowded.  The food section offered live fish and numerous types of meat (I am not certain I could identify which animal these came from).  We were very surprised to see a large Christmas tree in our hotel and to hear Christmas music at the store.

To say the least, we are all exhausted.  Samantha and Noah are sleeping and we are ready to do the same.  We have a full day of sightseeing planned for tomorrow.

Below are some pictures from today.

Beijing