Up, Up and Away - Again

July 5, 2015
 
By Sarah Ann
 
This morning after eating a traditional Korean breakfast of rice, kimchi, tofu soup and some vegetables that we didn’t know what they were, we got ready to go to church. It took us a really long time to get there and it was hard to find. We took the metro and the missionaries met us at the station – and we still arrived 45 minutes late! It was an English branch and everyone in my primary class was from the United States. Their families were mostly there because of the military. We left after the second hour because we had to catch a bus that would take us to the airport. At the airport, we would take a plane to China.


Our family in front of the Korean church
 
After leaving church and taking the metro back, Rachel, Taylor, my dad and I went to our hotel while my mom waited with Christian at the bus stop. We sprinted back to the hotel and got our suitcases. As we were sprinting back, the bus came. We missed it by a second.
At the airport, the way our tickets worked, two people would sit together, two people would sit together in a different part, and two people would sit by themselves. I volunteered to sit by myself, but luckily the person who was sitting by my mom and Christian moved, so I got to sit there.
 
Because of the one-hour time change, and because our flight was only one hour long (Dalian is just across the water from Seoul), we arrived at the same time we left. At the airport in China, we had to go through tons of different checkpoints – for immigration, customs, bag screening and for MERS (the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome that has broken out in Korea). They watched us for symptoms and did an automatic temperature screening as you walked through this area. Luckily, none of us had MERS. We were the last ones out of the area so the security guard told us (in Chinese but we guessed what he was saying) not to fill out all the forms – I think he wanted to go home. We met dad’s co-worker, Ning, at the airport who had a twenty-person bus for us to ride back to our apartment.
 
We actually have two apartments because our family is so big (most Chinese families only have one child because of it’s the law) and the apartments only have one big room – and a bathroom. There is a kids’ apartment and a parents’ apartment but they are next door to each other. The rooms are really nice but the pillows are super hard. Dalian is in the northeastern part of China, right on the coast and we can see the ocean from the roof. We went down to the cafeteria for dinner and ate the best fried rice I’ve ever tasted.
 


 
Here’s my in the kids’ apartment
 


 
The view from our roof
 
In China we can’t access basically anything on the internet – facebook, shutterfly, google, gmail, or our blog. So from now on, we’ll be sending this to my grandpa to post for us.
 
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