On The Plane and in Beijing

When we first boarded the plane the girls were excited.  We got on and Rachel said "Wow, is this what airplanes in China look like?"

Uh, sorry honey, this is first class.  We will be sitting a little further back.  Although it definitely was pretty cool, not like any first class I had ever seen.

We flew Delta the entire way and had a wonderful experience.  The staff was very helpful and kind.  

 

 

The flight from Detroit to Beijing, we were unable to sit together.  They had seats of three in a row.  So Rachel and I sat in the front area with lots of leg room.  This was nice because when she finally went to sleep I was able to lay some blankets down and lay her on the floor.  The man who sat next to us was from Chile.  He was very nice and offered to let Rachel play Minion Rush on his cell phone.  He has a four year old son.  He was going to Beijing for the first time for business.

Robbie and Elise sat a couple rows back next to a very nice man.  Several times I would look back to see if they needed anything and he would smile and talk and thought the girls were lovely.

We watched lots of movies, played Bejeweled and Backgammon.

Rachel turned 8 on the plane.

Happy Birthday!

 

We made it safely to Beijing and so did our suitcases, sort of.

The girls were a bit upset when their pretty neon suitcases were banged up.  Robbie's suitcase was actually partially open.  

Robbie's latches and locks on his suitcase were all messed up.  One of them was open.  He started looking at it and then snapped it shut.  In doing so he did not realize that the numbers had been changed, therefore changing the password.  Moment of panic when he realized that he could not get in his suitcase at all.  He finally tried several combinations and got it to work.  We did not realize until the next morning why:

Complimentary Water at the Beijing airport.

Our driver picked us up and took us to our hotel.  There was a lot of traffic, because of the holiday that is going on right now, but for the most part the drive was pretty uneventful.

We walked down to Wanfujing Street and did a bit of looking around.

Beautiful church.

Entrance to shopping street.

This was really cool.  He was "painting" with water on the sidewalk.

Bending wire to make toy bicycles.

Window shopping

There were lots of street vendors selling cantaloupe on a stick, but Robbie was hesitant to eat anything like that.

See if you can guess where we ate?

There was really loud music playing in the mall, so we went to check it out.  There were young guys breakdancing and drawing quite a crowd.

We had some pretty tired girls so we headed back to the Crown Plaza.