Today's the Day!!

Mary says....

Hello all! We are officially in Alina's city! We rode an overnight train from the capital arriving here about 6am. The train ride was interesting. We had a sleeper car with four bunks although we were the only ones staying in the car.

Right after the train took off, four local young people asked if they could sit with us until their stop one hour later. We agreed and had a delightful hour with them. Two of them spoke English, one spoke a little and the other understood it, but couldn't speak it.
They practiced their English and we tried some of their language (with the help of a little language book that we brought with us). They tried not laughing too much at my attempts (or massacre) of their language. We discussed everything from children to making pizza dough. We hope to run into them on the way back as they are commuters to the capital city and ride the train everyday.
After our new friends departed, we settled in to our sleeper car by making the beds with the fresh linens that were provided. We watched the countryside fly by our window ,it really is beautiful here, as we ate our dinner consisting of burgers and fries from McDonalds. Crazy right! We were thrilled to see a McDy's. Ok, I was. Tom would rather eat the local food. We will. Soon. :)

 
Soon we discovered that sleeping on the train would be more difficult than we had expected. I loved the movement of the train which was smooth for the most part, but it was hard to fall asleep. Probably from excitement, nervousness, etc. we both stayed up really late and then only slept in small increments. The attendant came by about 5 am to wake us up and let us know that our stop was approaching. Our facilitator had asked her to do that. The last time we were both up and functioning that early was the day we left for Arkansas.
After exiting the train and heading toward the station, I noticed a man walking toward us very fast with a piece of paper that I thought had Tom's name on it.

So the nice taxi driver didn't quite know where to take us. You see, we have an apartment in this beautiful city already reserved. But no one was in the office at 6am. So he took us to an Irish pub so we could have breakfast, kill time and wait. We've been at this pub for almost 3 hours! We had breakfast a long time ago. :)
They have been very good about letting us hang out. Nothing can dampen this day, we're going to meet Alina in just a few hours! I can't believe this time has come.
Gotta go, our local facilitators are here to help us begin the paperchase! Love to all!  What a day!! God is good!!