Topic: Travel day
Ni hao, everyone! It's currently 2:55 am China time, but as I've gotten 6 hours of sleep and am still on U.S. Pacific time, mostly at the moment, we're just killing time until breakfast.:)
To backtrack to our travel day a little. We arrived at SeaTac to find another traveling Fuling family had already beaten us: Maya and her mom Laurie. It's always so neat to meet other families with the same heritage and history.
Then onto the flight, a twelve hour nonstop on Hainan Airlines. I'd been hoping Liann would get a few hours sleep on the flight; sadly, she napped about an hour and that was all she wrote. However, she was the most wonderful travel partner a mom could ask for, and had lots of fun watching travelogues about China and short little odd Chinese cartoons on the seat's television. And of course, many Spongebob episodes from my laptop. The plane was not crowded, but the coveted middle 4-seat areas were claimed from the get-go.
The only minor setback to the trip was in the pre-arrival meal, when Liann - overtired I think - got sick in her seat. Fortunately, I had an abundance of Wet Wipes and we were able to get cleaned up with a minimum of discomfort, and Liann seemed fine after and continues to seem so.
We were picked up at the airport and experienced the Beijing traffic as we traveled to our hotel, the Joy City Hotel. According to our guide, traffic - always a challenge in Beijing - has gotten even worse. I want to say he said something like 4 million cars driving through daily, but don't quote me. I could have been jet lagged:). Although it did seem like we saw a quarter of that number on our drive to the hotel. The weather last night was very temperate - mid 50s - and the lights of the city were brilliant and quite lovely. Liann and Maya made each other giggle uncontrollably throughout the ride.
Liann and I have a beautiful corner room up on the 11th floor.of the Joy City Hotel. She was fast asleep about 20 seconds after her head hit the pillow (and some FINE pillows they are).
Today, when everyone else wakes up, we are touring the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, and - hooray - SHOPPING! So leaving you on that cliffhanger - What will Toddie buy and for whom? - I'll report in later. 
