Oh the Places You Will Go....

Sarah & I were SO VERY BLESSED this month to travel to Beijing, China, and visit with two very special friends of ours!! Our prayer was that we would be an encouragement to both of them, but as it turned out I think we were the ones that were encouraged the most. We were there for one week and shared many, many laughs, tears, hugs, times of worship and study and made memories that will be forever in our hearts and minds. He is SO GOOD to us!!

This was taken in the Manila airport, just before boarding our flight to Beijing. Here we go!!

My travelling companion :)

Our plane touched down in Beijing at exactly midnight. So thankful we made it, along with all the luggage. WE'RE REALLY HERE!!!

As we exited Customs, we were met with two little waving signs. Upside down, no less! Oh this is going to be one crazy week!!

We've been waiting for months for these hugs!!

Sooooo thankful to be here!

A special gift for my friend! (I made her close her eyes!) If you've ever visited us in Bacolod, you will recognize those boxes as Calea boxes, filled with the best cheesecake in the world. Yes, we took cheesecake all the way to China!

I know how to speak her love language!!

It was about 2 am when we finally got back to the house from the airport, but were we going to bed anytime soon.....NO WAY!! They had surprises for us! First, the most beautiful, amazing, fresh STRAWBERRIES!!!

And then they gave us both BEIJING SURVIVAL BAGS full of all manner of goodies!

(Remember, it's roughly 2:30 in the morning when this was taken. Hence the bad hair and no make-up.)

#1 necessity...earmuffs!

"What else is in here???"

Handwarmers! Another must.

And footwarmers!

And maps.

Then we began to unpack our surprises for them. These are all the things that we brought from Toya to give to them. Sarah set them all up and made Sav close her eyes.

And this was the reaction! LOVE IT!!!

The plate of never-ending cookie goodness!!!

(Seriously, there's no telling how many batches of cookies they made before we arrived! We ate cookies at EVERY meal and at all times in between. And whenever the plate would begin to be empty, Dar brings more cookies out of the freezer!! I'm pretty sure we walked off every calorie, though!)

Tour-guide Barbie going over our "plan" for the week.

The plan. (Are they prepared or what??)

After visiting for a while, we finally went to bed. (Some of us went to be earlier than some others. Might have something to do with our age??) But needless to say, no one got up early the next morning. In fact, we didn't have "breakfast" until about 2 pm! LOL

But Sav went all out and made Eggs Benedict (my FAV) for our breakfast/lunch. Yum-o!! (Notice the cookie plate on the table with our breakfast?? I told you...every meal!)

Yeah!! We get to eat those strawberries!!!

Chinese bacon. A little different than what we have in the PI.

I told you about the cookies, but I forgot to mention anything about the CAKE BALLS! Oh my. Pure sin!!

They made a chocolate cake -according to the recipe - and after it was baked, they crumbled it up and mixed that with an entire can of frosting!! Then they rolled them into balls and dipped them in melted chocolate chips. Like I said...sinful. And some were dipped in melted MINT chocolate chips. Wow. Can't even imagine how many calories!

After our "breakfast" at 2 pm, we finally got up from the table around 4 pm and decided to go out and about and see a little bit of Beijing!

Here we are all bundled up!! Not sure how many layers we had on at this point! These Beijing temps are quite a bit cooler than our tropical Philippine temps!! Our poor bodies were in shock.

We first walked to Sav's school to see her campus and her dorm room. Too cute!!

This is hanging over her bed.

It's still Christmas in Sav's room!!

Something went wrong when she washed these gloves! Ooops!!

LOVE the Charlie Brown tree!!

"Friends Gather Here"

Next we walked to another area and found a Papa John's!!!! Woohoo!!

We were pretty excited about this!!

Yeah for good friends and good pizza! The perfect combo!

Sarah and I trying out the Papa John's delivery bikes :)

One thing we discovered that night is that random groups of people (ladies, men and even children) like to gather in public places and dance!! Some groups even do ballroom dancing! We came upon these groups several times on our trip, but this night we decided to join them!