Middle Seats Suck!

Note -- We plan to blog every day but may not find internet sometimes. You won't miss anything because we're writing it all down. Just remember to scroll down in case two days get posted at a time.


Our flight from Omaha to Chicago was perfectly on time! We killed the four hours in Chicago by walking and meeting other adoptive families on our flight. There were at least five adoptive families on our flight. One family that sat in front of us is in our Holt group. Their child is in Guangdong Province, same province Meighan was in.


When we got to Chicago and looked at our boarding passes, we realized we were not seated together (like I thought we were when we checked in online). When they did the visa check, I mentioned it and they seated us together. I ended up in the middle seat for the ENTIRE flight. The good thing was that they seated us in Economy Plus area that has extra leg room. Tony slept some and I was able to relax enough to sleep some, too. The other person in our three seats (in the center so no windows) was a young gal going to study Mandarin in Beijing for 4 1/2 months. She was a very good seat mate.


They fed us well on the long flight. One of the really cool things about this particular plane was that not only did we each have our own screen to watch things on, we could each watch whatever we wanted--movies, TV shows, kids shows, listen to music or audio books, play games on the touch screen, watch the map of our location and route and check how much time we had left. I enjoy watching the map every once in a while. I think it's interesting. I checked out what movies there were (quite a few to choose from) and decided to watch "Courageous" first. I had heard many good things about it. I cried almost the entire movie--happy and sad crying! This is a movie EVERYONE should see, especially men! I'll leave it at that in case you haven't seen it. See it!


We finally arrived at Beijing at 3:55 pm local time. We went through immigration (no problem), found the train to the baggage claim (no problem), got our bags (no problem), walked through Customs (no problem), and found our guide to help us get checked in for our flight to Xian (no problem). Arthur was our best friend for the next 30 minutes or so. He got us to security and then, of course, couldn't go any further. It's really good to walk more then 15 feet at a time!


We arrived in Xian at 10:30 pm. We had trouble staying awake the several hours and actually didn't even try some of the time. We found our guide, Sean (as in Sean Connery) and he took us to our van. Our driver is Mr. Xia (means "summer" in Chinese). He took us to our very nice hotel (1 hr drive) and Sean helped us check in. Our room is on the 7th floor and it was SOOOOO good to see a BED!  In recent memory I've never been so glad to see a bed as I was tonight! We got ready for bed as quickly as we could and laid down just after midnight on the 10th. We were soooo tired so it didn't take long to fall asleep. (We'd been up for over 30 hours.)