The Journey Here

It's so good to be here. After a little delay in Houston, we made it to Mongolia (although a day later than we had expected). Our Father was gracious to us at every turn, taking what we thought was a bad situation and turning it into good. We really needed the extra time to sleep in the hotel, since we were up until 3am the night before we left trying to fit our stuff into 4 bags instead of the 6 we had originally planned on. When we got to LA, we had to wait 6 hours for the Air China desk to open up to check into our next leg. We waited at Starbucks with all our luggage piled up in the corner. We shared our table with a nice group of people from England who were waiting for their relative to arrive from Australia. When the desk opened, we found out that our connecting flights from LA and Beijing were not re-booked in Houston and therefore were canceled since we didn't show up for our flights. Thankfully, there was a kind woman at the Air China desk that helped us figure out what to do. We had to go to the other airline and get proof of our delay. The woman also was kind in booking us on the flight with lots of leg room, which was a huge blessing. She was so kind and thoughtful, we wanted to give her a big hug! I (Jess) was also thankful to be able to sleep for 9 of the 12 hours to Beijing. When we arrived in Beijing, we found the airport to huge and very beautiful in its design, but dark and errily quiet. We went through several check points and made it through the automatic temperature reading station without a problem (which I was a little worried about!). When we arrived in Mongolia we found that only 3 of our bags had arrived with us. But thankfully, our teammates 4 bags that were missing when they arrived the day before, had come on the last leg of our journey with us. We were greeted by one of our teammates in Mongolia and loaded up the car and headed to our new place! The next day we heard from my mom that the Beijing airport had called them asking where to send our bag. The transfer tag had come off and thankfully we had their address and phone number on there in case something happened. So, our final bag arrived the next day with big straps with Chinese writing on them. We were glad that all had arrived safely. Our bags took quite a beating though. It's amazing to see what happens to them on their long journey. We had a dent in the rim of our stainless steel water filter that was in a box inside our suitcase and my airbake cookie sheet is slightly bent and smashed a little. :) We're so excited to be in our new home. We spent the first week getting acquainted with the shops and markets around town (along with our teammates who have been here for 3 years already). It made us all the more excited to learn the language so we can start forming relationships with people like our stair cleaning lady and the fruit stand lady and all kinds of people who we have met so far.