Houston, We HAVE Arrived...

Well holy muffin in the oven, we're here! After being dropped off at the Detroit Airport by none other than my other mother Momma Jann, we flew off to Toronto in a little tiny plane! Good ol' Air Canada took care of us just fine! We got to walk up the steps onto the little propeller-ed guy and everything. Twas rather exciting...then after a short jolt to Toronto, we hung out in a pretty sweet airport for awhile. Had some lunch, enjoyed the wireless network on our iPods, and prepared for the largo next leg of the trip. After boarding the hugemongous plane...thank goodness for the size because I just might have gone insane had it been smaller...we all settled in. We were pretty much in the same general area. Brian and I had a three person row to ourselves and he served as the lookout for what we were flying over. It was actually really cool. We flew up over the top of the world, saying hello to Santa on the way. Don't worry, we have pictures, which I may put up at some point, but I'm going to have to go to sleep pretty soon! Brad met his new best friend Charlie, who was in the US for some sort of science competition...he lives about forty minutes outside of Beijing (which, by the way is the LARGEST city that I have ever seen and it's SO confusing because there are just huge, tall cool-looking buildings everywhere you look with a random Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut, or Starbucks mixed in...haha). Anyways, on the plane I actually accomplished quite a bit. Let's see, I watched an episode of Sex and the City, Smart People, 21, and part of The National Lampoons and Horton Hears a Who! We were fed thrice...which was pretty sweet, and I got a pretty good grasp of how to use chopsticks during that time. Considering I left my fork back in the good ol' U-S of A...I really only slept for about two hours, buuuut oh well! Anyhoooo, we got there (errr...here) around four in the afternoon and found Lee! Lee is the guy who owns the apartment we're renting and he's super helpful. He picked us up from the airport, got us into a taxi (well two taxis actually...since there are five of us we have to saddle up in two different taxis any time we want to go someplace...it can be a bit more difficult than you think sometimes), took us to the apartment, took us out to dinner, and then showed us the way home! Dinner was delicious by the way...but WAY too much food. It was unbelievable how much was just left on the table...we had a hard time just walking away from it. Hahaha. But we got home and conked out...exhausting day of travel. The first night wasn't too bad...I'm off in my own little room (that usually serves as the office) on an air mattress and I only woke up once for about twenty minutes. I was pretty proud. Hopefully But, we got to where we wanted to go with the added bonus of zero deaths! We all got our temporary residence permits and headed out. This was when we had to say goodbye to Lee. AKA our lifeline up to this point. Without him, we were kind of (and by kind of I mean VERY) clueless. Well, at least I was. Then again, I'm just along for the ride! Hahaha. We made it to CoSport alright to pick up our tickets for all of the events and then went to the Bank of America (basically our little American Embassy...World of Our Own...ya know) tent, which was in the China Lounge! Basically if you have the place you want to go in Chinese...then the taxi driver can pretty much get you there...or at least close. Wow this is getting very long...my apologies. Hmmm okay. So this place (officially called Hometown Hopefuls) is AMAZING. Once you get in and go through security and all that we got our I.D. cards and scan in cards and all that business. Very handy. Everything is free. They have snacks everywhere and drinks on all three levels. They serve lunch and dinner every day...there's ice cream, fruit, chinese food, all kinds of stuff and it's everywhere you turn! You can even use the computers and get internet access...along with a free massage! There are western toilets....oh it's just beautiful. We ended up there for both lunch and dinner...good stuff. After lunch we decided to go see what tickets they had available (yes, for free) and we picked up five tickets to go see Team Handball! What a cool sport. It was so under rated when we played in middle school. Hahaha. Of course I had forgotten some of the rules, so it took us a bit to get used to what was going on, but it was so interesting! The first game was Brazil vs. France and the second game was Korea vs. Germany. Germany and France came out victorious. Crazy business. During the game we participated in the "Mexican Wave!" Yes, the MEXICAN wave. It's the wave. After several VERY poor attempts, the audience (or about half of it at least) got the picture and did it successfully! Quite the ordeal. But what was better, was the halftime show. Yup. The little crazy looking characters they have on everything? Well, there are people dressed up as them...and they dance around with the cheerleaders in their glittery outfits doing random dances to the Cha Cha Slide (not the correct movements of course...pretty sure they didn't know what was going on there, but maybe it was scewed because it was the remix...haha just kidding). Anyways, of course it started pouring rain while we were there, so after the games we waited for awhile and then headed out to the beautiful China Lounge/American Embassy/Heavenly Area. It's so nice to be surrounded by other people from the U.S. And it's so interesting to see where everyone is from and what they're there for! The coolest one I met today was a guy whose son is in slalom...white water kayaking and canoeing...CRAZY. Didn't quite know that was in the olympics, but more power to ya! Hahaha. After an interesting ride in the cab, with a phone call to Lee to get us here, we're back and everyone else is in bed. Hope all is well wherever every one is who is reading this! Tomorrow we have women's basketball in the morning (yup, free tickets) followed by THE FIRST POLO GAMEEEE. USA vs. China at 5:00 I believe? Really very early in the morning for those of you in the Eastern Time Zone... Hopefully this wasn't too painful to read...I shall continue to update and hopefully add pictures every once in awhile...woohoo! Go USA! :)