The Long Flight To China 8/23/2009

Here we sit in Nanning, Guangxi getting ready for our first night of greatly needed sleep in China. I don't even know how many hours we've been wearing these clothes, and would prefer not to think about how they must smell. Instead we'll tell you all the good experiences thus far. We flew to LA and had a long layover, then headed to Beijing at 1:40 am. We slept pretty good considering the upright position and the guy with sinus problems behind us. The strangest part was leaving LA in the dark, flying for 12 hours and having it still be dark when we landed. It was very llllloooooonnnnngggg, and we started right into the Chinese food, eating at about 4 in the morning and then again before we landed. Everyone teases Nikki about loosing weight but this mixed-up schedule has us eating at crazy times and we'll probably come home chubby! The Beijing airport was big, new, clean and quiet at a graveyard seeing as how we arrived at 5 in the morning on a Sunday. We found our connecting gate and made a quick call home to leave a message for the kids telling them we'd made it to China. Beijing was cloudy and smoggy to the point we didn't see a thing flying in or out--guess we will have to "see" it on our way home.

Flying into Nanning was incredible. The farmlands and the karst mountains were beautiful from up in the air. The area has tons of sugar cane fields, beautiful flowers and lots of greenery. The heat and humidity are both high, and it was quickly obvious why everyone carries around an umbrella to hide from the sun. The Nanning airport was small and we easily got our baggage and found our guide Hannah, who seems very nice and helpful and competent. She had many good ideas to share with us about tomorrows "Gotcha Day" as they refer to it in the adoption world. Hannah had the driver take us to our hotel (about 20 minutes) which is very nice and got us checked in and told us what we needed to have ready for tomorrow.

We took a cab to McDonald's and walked around the shopping area, including Walmart (yes, 8000 miles to buy water at Walmart). The kids would have really loved the octopus in the meat department they made a heart out of! We had a great time soaking in the sights on the trip to the hotel and shopping. Old apartment buildings as close as they can be with laundry hanging from the windows, tall hotels, street sweepers with their homemade brooms, a man pulling his oxen down the highway with a load, insane drivers, cabs with 2 person buggys. Nikki had to take the buggy cab back to the hotel and Todd said he felt like he was in a James Bond movie. We must have been so tired our reflexes were poor enough that we weren't scared for our life on the ride, but it was great fun!

We finished the night with a walk around a huge park a couple minutes from our hotel--beautiful, peaceful, picturesque China. Tomorrow we meet Hannah our guide at 3:15 to head to the Civil Affairs office to meet FuJiao. As we left home I kept thinking in my head "The journey of 1000 miles begins with one step." Many more than 1000 miles are behind us and we can only hope tomorrow will be a continuation of an amazing adventure.