Greetings from Beijing!

Hey all!Bryan and I landed in Beijing about an hour ago (9:00 p.m. here 7:00 a.m. there). We are currently at the Novotel Peace Hotel. The flight from Minnesota to Tokyo was grueling. We left at 1:00 p.m. Central Time on the 23rd and arrived in Tokyo 12 hours later. We then set our watches ahead 16 hours and it magically become 5:00 p.m. on the 24th! We lost a day! Sure, we'll get a day back on the way home, but it won't be this day. The 23rd of January is gone forever!Tomorrow we go to the Summer Palace and some temple that I'm too tired to remember the name of right now. (Remember - we haven't slept yet and it feels like 7 in the morning.) We'll see the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square on Friday and the Great Wall on Saturday! We will post pictures as soon as possible. No pictures today though - if you've seen the inside of one 747, you've seen them all. And the Tokyo airport looks surprisingly like the Minneapolis airport - but with cigarettes, and Japanese people. And dried squid in the convenience store-that was cool. Anyhooo - time for bed. I will post more later.