Finding a place to eat

We ventured out tonight without our guide. She told us where a McDonalds and a Pizza Hut was. It was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. We decided on Pizza Hut. They started us out with warm lemon water. It was different. We did pretty good ordering, although our waitress did not speak English, because the menus had Chinese and English on them. We were able to point to what we wanted. I ordered milk tea to drink. It tasted kind of like hot chocolate. It was good. They have about 10 pages in the menu that were not pizza. We were not sure about a lot of it so we just stuck with the Pizza. For dessert, we ordered Tiramisu. I could not believe they had it at Pizza Hut! It was great!!
Not much longer before we get Kinsley. We have learned they call her Zhi Zhi. It is pronounced "tzuit-tzuit" and you say it really fast tzuit-tzuit. The language here is really hard to learn. We are trying to learn certain phrases we can use to communicate with her such as:
"do you need to go to the toilet= neow neow ma"
"are you hungry= knee ooh ma",
"Baby I love you = hi tzuit woah i knee"
I have typed how to say each phrase by its pronunciation. It is not actually spelled that way in Chinese.

Smog

Just wanted to show you how bad the smog is here.

The Yellow Crane Tower

We met Zoey our guide and she took us to tour the Yellow Crane Tower. It was neat to see.

Saturday in China: Breakfast

We ate breakfast at the buffet which was included in our room. They had American food and Chinese food. We ate the American food first and it was good. We then decided to try a sampling of some of the other food that we did not recognize. Some of it was good and some not so good.

Post from Wayne about our flight

We arrived in LA and we were told earlier we would have to claim our bags there. We went to the baggage claim and the baggage started coming out and we never saw ours! We waited about 30 minutes -- no luggage. So I thought that they had lost our luggage! I said a prayer that we would find our luggage because it had EVERYTHING in it! I went to the baggage customer service and they said it had already been routed through to Guangzhou -- answered prayer!!! We then had to find our connecting flight with China Southern. We didn't know where that was so I asked a man and he said we would have to take bus "A". We waited 10 minutes and the bus arrived. We rode around for about 15 minutes until finally we came to the China southern terminal. We got our tickets and found our gate number. It was on the back side of no-where in the "Hood"! We had a 3 hour wait. When we started to board, we were actually put on another bus (standing room only) and we road to the other side of the "Hood" to another building and finally boarded the plane. A month ago I had been praying about this long flight because I just can't handle long journeys very well. That flight to Brazil was much shorter than that and I got squirrely. Again I prayed that I would make this 15 hour flight. Long story short, I made it fine, I slept most of the trip (even though we had NO room and our knees were literally touching the seat in front of us). Again God answered our prayers! We arrived in Guangzhou, claimed our bags and found another passenger who could speak English and he showed us where to go to re-check our baggage for the last leg of the flight. We went through security and found our gate. We had a 4 hour wait (we thought). On the flight information board, we noticed that our flight to Wuhan had been cancelled!!!! Here we are in China, can't speak Chinese and don't know what to do. We found a lady who could speak some English and she told us we had to go back out of security to the ticket counter to find out what we were to do now. The whole time I was thinking what about our luggage, how are we going to get to Wuhan, what about our guide who is waiting on us there, etc. All of these fears and anxieties started setting in. Again we started praying, it was out of our control and in God's hands. We just prayed that He would oversee the situation. We got to the ticket counter and the lady said the flight was back on again. Thank you Jesus! Another answered prayer. Long story short, we went back through security and to the boarding gate. Our flight ended up being delayed 1 hour but we made it fine!
Through this whole process God is showing us to rely on Him and not on ourselves.

4:30AM

Well, I am up at 4:30 AM. I can't sleep so I thought I would blog. Thanks for the Facebook messages. I can get them on my email - personal message or wall post, I get them all - I just can't respond to them. Thanks so much, it makes me so emotional to read them. Well I think I have woke Wayne up also - I was trying so hard to be quiet but now we are both up! Maybe we can have an early breakfast (buffet in the hotel) then take a nap before Zoey meets us at 10:00 AM in the lobby (for some sightseeing)!

Supper

After a shower, we went downstairs to eat in the hotel restaurant. Cheeseburger and fries (not too good! The meat tasted like corned beef, it was heavily seasoned like that) and some type of hoagie with egg and ham on it. It tasted pretty good! The fries were good! Maybe we will try Chinese food tomorrow. Went back to the room to go to bed! We needed rest!!!

at the bank

Wayne with Zoey at the bank.

Money exchange

We went across the street from our hotel to the China Bank and exchanged some of our money. As you can see, I look pretty bad. That is how we looked after traveling 33 1/2 hours on the plane! Excited but very exhausted. I just wanted a SHOWER! We bought some water (because we can't drink their water here either) and went back to the hotel to shower.

Hotel

Pic of our hotel. It is very nice. The smog here is terrible. It looks like it is foggy here!

We arrived at the airport...

We arrived at the airport with Zoey waiting for us holding a sign with our name on it! She was so sweet and energetic. She called our driver (the same one that will be with us the first 7 days) and he met us at the front of the airport and helped us with our bags. We had about an hours drive to the hotel.

We made it to China safely!

We made it to China safely!! We are in Guangzhou and waiting on our last connecting flight to our final destination which is Wuhan. It leaves at 9:50pm your time (10:50am our time). The flight from Los Angeles was 15 hrs long--we slept some but our seats were so close together that our knees hit the persons seat in front of us! We stood up several times to stretch our legs. With all of that said, we are SOoooo excited to be here!!!!!!! We will have a guide to meet us at the airport in Wuhan to take us to our hotel. Thanks so much for all of your prayers!!! We need them all! So far we are not able to get on facebook or our blog but my sister in law Cathy is posting on our blog for us (thanks Cathy!!). We will post try to post later with pics. Especially on Monday when we finally get Kinsley!!

All of your words of encouragement mean so much to us!! For the last 30 minutes, we have been reading facebook posts (they come to my email from facebook but we can't respond because we can't actually access facebook, just our email right now) thanks for ALL of them!!!! They really mean so much especially because we are so far away from anyone we actually know at this moment.
Thanks again!!