Nihau from Wuhan! It is Sunday morning (March 23) here in eastern China, midway between Beijing and Shanghai. Looking out the hotel room window the skies are grey and rain is predicted, a nice spring rain. As we got off the plane last night, it was obvious that spring has come to China, with temps in the mid-70s.

This part of China is 13 hours ahead of Central Daylight Time, so we lost a day in travel.  We took 3 flights: Minneapolis to Detroit, Detroit to Beijing, and Beijing to Wuhan, and all 3 were on time departing and leaving. When does that ever happen? We were in daylight for the whole trip across the northern tundra and ice, flying northwest across Canada and Alaska and the Bering Strait making an arc to turn southwest over the Arctic Ocean and down through Siberia, Outer Mongolia to Beijing.  Looking out the window to bright blue skies, all that was below was white ice. When we first saw land, it looked brown and dry with little vegetation and mountains between steppes. As we approached Beijing, the brown cloud of pollution became thicker and thicker, and was ever-present on the trip south to Wuhan.

Pastor Wang, the principal of the Protestant Seminary, met us at the airport with a 4^th year student, Lydia. As we walked into this alien terminal, looking nothing like everyone else and seeing Chinese writing all over, we were filled with relief to have someone call our names! The drive from the airport to our hotel, Qing Jiang Hotel, in the center of the city, took about an hour—this is a city of 10 million people, after all, and it seemed as if on Saturday night all of them were celebrating in the streets. Stores were open, families and couples and groups of friends were wandering everywhere. The street markets were in full operation, cooking food (snake was available, Lydia said) and selling all manner of goods. There are skyscrapers everywhere, cranes bump out the sky to build more, we saw lots of bright neon, all in Chinese characters, and there are more motorbikes than cars, and they seem to have free reign to go anywhere they want.

We had a great sleep, after being up some 28 hours, and now have had some instant coffee in our room and are ready to begin the day. We will be picked up about 10:30 to go to an English-Chinese church. Apparently many university students come to practice their English.

Next post will have more photos!