We left our hotel in Beijing this morning and flew to Hangzhou (pronounced "hung jo") which is the capital city of Natalie's province. Our new guide met us and the other couple traveling with us, Tony and Angie Boyce, at the airport. The guide told us that Hangzhou is one of the most popular cities in China and is considered paradise. Maybe like Santa Barbara in the U.S. or something like that. It is very green here with lots of flowers blooming already, and a ton of stuff going on. This city has 10 million people living here, so we still had horrible traffic. We have gotten to the point where we can't watch the roads because people drive very differently here. It is scary. There is not as much order and so cars will drive straight at each other until one of them swerves off to the side. I don't know how many times we thought our little bus would hit someone or another car and it just missed by inches. There is no such thing as pedestrians having the right of way here!
After we checked into the hotel, we walked around with Tony and Angie and our guide and then stopped at a supermarket to pick up snacks and baby items. Prices for that stuff is very good here. We ended up crossing the street from our hotel and having KFC for dinner. In Beijing it seemed that most of the people we came across spoke some English, and there were a ton of white people. Here we have not seen a single white person besides our little group, and no one speaks much English. We had a hard time even ordering at KFC, we could only point to a picture and gesture to describe what we wanted. It was pretty comical!
We have now settled into our new rooms which we will be in for 5 days so I actually unpacked this time and put everything away. All of Natalie's stuff is ready to go and her diaper bag is packed for tomorrow morning. We leave the hotel at 8:45am for the Ministry of Civil Affairs office, where we will meet her when she is driven here from Ningbo where her orphanage is. Tony and Angie will get their daughter first, so we will help videotape for them and then they will help us try to get some good video of the handoff. I will try hard to get pictures and video posted as soon as I can tomorrow but I know we have at least a couple of hours at the government office to do adoption paperwork and then we'll come back and lay low in our hotel room. It will be late Sunday night in Omaha by the time I can post anything so by Monday morning hopefully there will be some great pics of our new daughter with us! I am getting nervous now. Excited too, but nervous. My life is about to change!!
No comments:
Post a Comment