It's Nikki! We couldn't get the internet to work in our room, which happens to be room 1313, we found out that the connection in our room doesn't work, so they gave us the key to another room, where the internet works great. (And Angela didn't believe us that 13 was an unlucky number...)
Anyway, our flight was great, besides being endlessly long, in my opinion. Annie was great, she slept for a while, played quietly, and ate her kid's meal. (Which looked more appetizing then anything the we got...)We got to Beijing around 4:00pm Thursday, right on time.
Yesterday we went to the Great Wall, the Ricksaw Tour and saw what a typical Beijing Family's house is like, and then went to the acrobat show. The tour was really interesting, we found out that they live in square houses, and each house has a square courtyard in the center. Some of the rooms are very modern. They had TV's, light fixtures and posters, and then there were more traditional rooms, like the living room, which had a large fish bowl in the center with gold fish in it, which are good luck in China. The kitchen was so cramped, and dim, it was barely getting getting any light. As I said, we learnded alot of facts and information that you would probably never learn otherwise.
The Great Wal was amazing. I know everyone talks about how incredible it is, but until you've been on it, you can't possibly have an idea of how awesome it is. To think that men carried these rocks up mountians, and built this giant wall, it's mind-blowing. It was beautiful. However, we had to get down the mountain somehow, and the fstest way down was the tobagan. It's mostly a metal chute that winds down to the bottom of the ski-lift that brings you up, and you sit on this little tobagan that you can break by pulling back a handle. We convinced my mom to go down, despite her fear of flying down a mountain in a metal chute. She did very well.
I'm sure the Acrobat show would have been really cool, but I was half asleep through most of it. Annie slept through it all, and, although she'll kill me for saying this, so did my mom. I had to keep poking her to wake her up. But the parts that we did see were very cool.
The minute we got back to the Hotel after dinner, we all crashed. It's around 6:00 taht the Jet lag catches up to you, and your about ready to paSS out. There will be more posts tomorrow, after we get to Kunming. We're about to go to dinner with my Uncle, who we met up with this afternoon. The trips been great so far, bu ti can't wait unitl Gotcha Day!!!

~Nikki, Michele, Rich, and Annie