I woke up at 2:00 after 4.5 hours of sleep. I got up for about a half hour as I wasn’t falling right back to sleep. Once I lay back down, I slept until about 6:30. I had the most vivid dreams at some point during the night—not exactly sure if they were during the first hours of sleep or the latter hours.
Two of the dreams where about having gone back to the U.S. to attend a local STC meeting, and then realizing when I was back there, that I was supposed to be in China. I panicked wondering how I was going to be able to get a flight back the same or next day, and how incredibly expensive it was going to be.
The first time I dreamed it, it was so real that when I woke up I was so overwhelmingly relieved to already be in China. When I feel asleep again, and it started happening again, I actually said to myself, in the dream, “I know this seems so real, but I know I’m just dreaming. Wake up.”
I have been able to do this in the past with dreams that are so scary that I want to wake up from them. However, it did not work this time, so once again, when I woke up I was incredibly relieved that it was a dream. Weird.
One of the first things I did this morning was to spray, a very small amount fortunately, some hand sanitizer into my mouth instead of the Zicam I had with me for my cold.
Breakfast this morning was a complimentary buffet, as it will be each morning we’re here at the Swissotel in Beijing. I overate, and I overate bad things—way too many carbs. It was all good, though, and I hope to make better choices the next two mornings. We’ll see.
There were two incredibly hot men in the area of my table, both Swedes or somewhere of that origin, so not dark-haired and hairy like I’m usually attracted to. They both had on jeans that made me think of the lyrics from that country song Badonkadonk: “Lawd have mercy how’d she even get those britches on?”
I had good mornings from Paula and Kathy, and then Linda stopped by my table to tell me that people are having a hard time accessing livejournal.com (for our group blog), which stressed me out. Nothing could be worse than having recommended a blog provider, and then it not work. Especially since the blog provider Linda wanted to use was blogger.com and she said she had no problem posting to her personal blog on it.
I may have to break down and pay $14 to access the Internet in this hotel, and see if I have any problems posting. Grrrrr.
We had an “In-Country Briefing” this morning from 9:00-11:00, in which we were filled in on what to expect throughout our entire trip. Alexia took a couple of pictures, since she was our blogger for today.
Shawn introduced “Richard” who will be the guide for the guests in their touring while we’re in meetings. We covered how to say hello and good morning.
The rest of the briefings covered the following topics. I’ve put the details behind a cut. Click on them if you’re interested in reading them.