I have arrived

I know this post is a little late, but I thought it was necessary.
I arrived in China on August 12th. Now that I have been here a few days, I am sure that I will love it though things will be different here than in the USA. So here is how the arrival went...
I flew from B'ham to Chicago Monday morning. Then Monday around noon I left Chicago headed for Beijing! The flight to Beijing was long (13 hours) but not as bad as I had anticipated it being. When I got to Beijing, I had to hurry because my flight to Xi'an was supposed to leave in about an hour (the flight from Chicago was a little late). So I hurried as fast as I could through immigration. That is where they check your passport and stamp it. It took probably 20 minutes. So at this point I really had to hurry because I wasn't sure exactly where I was supposed to go. I hurried down to the baggage claim where I proceeded to get two carts and put all 200+ pounds of luggage on them. Then I proceeded to roll the carts to the place where I had to check my luggage. On the way to the Air China desk, I went through customs which took a lot less time than I had anticipated. So I get my luggage off of the carts and have them scanned by customs and then get them back on the carts and then I move on the the Air China Desk. At the ticket counter I was informed that I was too late to get on that flight even though it didn't leave for another half an hour. So I got booked on another flight that left about 4 hours later. Needless to say I got to spend some time exploring the Beijing Airport (it is really nice). After I checked my luggage, I had to find a phone to call the people who would be waiting on me in Xi'an. This was the worst part of the trip. I couldn't get my credit card to work like it was supposed to in the phone machine. So I went and had some money exchanged. When I got to the place where I was supposed to buy the phone card, I didn't have the right bill for the machine. So I went and got some more money. I went back to the phone card machine and put my money in, but it didn't spit out a phone card. I asked some young girls who worked there if they could help me, but they didn't speak much english and I don't speak any mandarin so they couldn't tell me how to get a refund. However, they did show me what I had done wrong. I had selected something wrong. Keep in mind that at this point I have been trying to get in touch with the people for about an hour now. So then I had a phone card and I took it over to the pay phone. I inserted the card and the machine said card error! That is when I had had it. I started to tear up. I tried my credit card again and it didn't work. At this point I was crying but not sobbing. Remember I had been traveling for almost 24 hours at this point as well. The girls that had helped me get the phone card were kind of hovering to see what was wrong, they could obviously tell that I was upset and was having lots of trouble. Finally one of them came over and put my phone card in and it worked! I had put it in upside down. After all of that I got intouch with the people who were picking me up and I went on to have a lovely time in the airport! The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, but I did make it safely to Xi'an at about 10:30 pm china time(9:30am-aug 12th alabama time). So it took me about 27 hours to get there, but I did arrive.