We landed in Beijing on time and in pretty good spirits. Our travel agency actually did something right – they booked us in an exit row, so we had lots of leg room. In addition, we had light all throughout the 11 hour flight from Vancouver Canada to Bejing since we took off at 12:30 PM Pacific Coast time, and landed at 2:30 p.m. Beijing time, so it really helped with the jet lag. Turns out that Beijing is the world largest airport – but it is also first class. We were whisked away pretty quickly on an underground train system probably 3 miles to the main terminal – and when we got there, we may have waited a total of 3 minutes for our luggage to arrive in one piece! (Yea!). We got through customs very easily, and then went out to find our ride from the travel agency, who was supposed to be there to meet us. I have never seen such a crowd and array of signs with people’s names. There must have been easily over 100 signs of people/s names waiting to be picked up. We had to slow down just to read all the signs. Luckily, we were wearing “Tishirts” with the logo of our travel agency and a distinctive “Beijing 2008 Olympics picture on back” – and we were able to spot our guide about 2/3 of the way through the sea of signs. Turns out the T-shirts were very fortuitous because we had to wait for another family who was evidently on our same flight but missed the sign. After a few minutes of looking around, the father noticed our T-shirts and found us and we all were reunited. We then had a private driver take us to our hotel, getting there about 5:00 after all was said and done
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