Welcome to China!

July 16, 2011

Before i talk about today allow me to explain a little bit about the flight. Our flight itinerary showed that it would be 36 hours from when we left Cleveland to when we arrived in Beijing. Now that's not total flight time, that's including our stops in Detroit and Tokyo (we had layovers in both). Our longest flight (Detroit to Tokyo) was only 13 hours. All of our flights went by smoothly except for our final flight from Tokyo to Beijing. I believe it was only supposed to be 4 hours but it ended up being 8. The story: It was nighttime, everyone was tired, and we all were beginning to wonder why this flight seemed so long! Just after the thought crossed my mind, our captain  announced that we had been circling over Beijing for some time now because there was a terrible storm going on. He then said that obviously we don't have enough fuel to circle around Beijing forever so we will turn around and land in South Korea.  So that was that, we flew nearly half way back to Tokyo and landed in South Korea. In South Korea we all sat on the plane for an hour and then took back off and landed smoothly in Beijing.

We landed in Beijing at 2 A.M. this morning. Julia and i stepped out of the plane and into the tunnel that lead to the terminal together. That moment was huge. My thoughts were 'Wow, we're actually in China'. We had been looking forward to this trip since last school year, and we were actually here. We were in China!

We left the airport on a bus and drove the two hour trip to our boarding school in Tianjin. When we got off the bus at our school nobody was talking about the long flights or how great it was to be here. We all spent about five minutes looking into the sky and asking, "Is that the sun?" The sun here is just a pale orange circle in the sky. You can stare into it without blinking or squinting. Its really sad actually.

Our dorm rooms are not bad. There are two beds per room. One thing that surprised us all was the showers. The showers aren't separated by a curtain or door, in fact they don't even have their own tub or floor. The shower is just a nozzle near the ceiling that sprays water over the toilet and onto the bathroom floor (flooding our dorm room in the process). Breakfast this morning was dumplings and bread. I have to go to my language class now so that's it from me today!