First Night in Wuhan, China

We arrive and meet Linda and Lily!

The first place we stayed in China

My room

Is that a Big-Mac? (No, I didn't get one)

Green Tea Tiramisu! ( I wanted more of this!)

Color Changing Tent!

Real Chinese noodles, so good after about 24 hours of traveling

“It is 10:35pm and I’m sitting in my room at the Xinagu Hotel in Wuhan, China. We spent most of the day on a plane. We went through Greenland, over the Arctic Circle, over Russia, and over Mongolia before finally reaching Beijing. It was flight 2 of the trip and lasted about 13 hours. Once we finally landed we had to go through customs. Because we had already obtained Chinese visas we were able to be rushed through the process. I was able to follow Andrew through the Chinese nationalist line and was done in no time. Beijing had a huge airport…

From the Wuhan airport we took a bus with our tour guides, Lily and Linda, and our friend Steve. Steve is a teacher from the US who moved over to teach in Wuhan a few years back. Lily and Linda are Chinese and certified tour guides, they picked western names so western people wouldn’t mispronounce their real names...

Including all the layovers and bus travel we were in transit for about 24 hours. My body thinks it is 13 hours earlier…

The internet takes so long that my mail won’t load…

There is a real mix of the east and the west everywhere I’ve been so far.

My first impression in Beijing and Wuhan is all the smog! There really is so much that I could feel it and smell it even in the airport. It makes it hard to see much of the city at once and it looks like there is fog covering everything.

It’s exciting to be here. So far it hasn’t seemed too different from any other large city. One thing that is unique is that it is clearly still developing. New skyscrapers and huge malls are being built all over. We passed one complex that housed migrant workers who come to build the city. It was small, cramped, and looked very uncomfortable. It looked like they slept on plywood bunk beds with no mattress.

There was a small girl, about 4, standing in front of the compound. She was wearing a red coat. I couldn’t help but wonder where her parents were…”