Today’s the day that begins my journey across the world! I woke up early at my grandparent’s house, so they could take me to the bus station in Bethlehem. From there, the bus took us to JFK airport where we arrived extremely early before the flight. Of course, we waited two hours on the plane before take off as well, and then had an extremely long thirteen hour flight to Beijing. I was hoping to have a more comfortable plane ride with movie selections, but I was disappointed. Several movies in Chinese played, along with a Tinker Bell movie which ran multiple times. I stuck to sleeping and music to get me through. When we finally arrived at the airport, two people’s bags were lost, so again we waited awhile until the mess was sorted out. I was impressed with the airport in Beijing. It was very modern, large, and it was nice how luggage carts were free as opposed to airports in the U.S.
Nearly midnight, we got to the hotel and saw how nice it was. I expected a much smaller place to stay, but it is very large with a nice room and hard beds. It was also time to eat, so instead of the planned welcome dinner, we went to a nearby restaurant. One of the coordinators, Vivien, chose a bunch of different items of food for us to try. This being my first experience with food in China, I was very nervous. I was surprised to find that much of the food was actually very good. As I expected, I didn’t enjoy all of it, but for the most part it was a positive experience.
Once we finished our food, we returned to the hotel to rest up. Before going to bed, we decided to try and get our safe to work. We got locked out, so the front desk had to be called to come and fix the problem. It took multiple trips for the worker and quite a bit of time, but eventually we had the safe working fine. Now it’s time to finally get a good night’s sleep, with the seven hours left before waking up.