Today's the Day!

China here we come!!!

Calendar we made for Carter and Myah so they can know what to expect while we are gone

Less than 7 hours to go! We are 13 hours ahead of you all so it is 6:30pm Sunday night there but it is 7:30am Monday in Taiyuan and today is the day we meet our baby.

We slept pretty well thankfully and feel much better today!!! The flight was a bit of a beast and it was hard to get comfortable enough to sleep. I started feeling very motion sick a couple hours before our first 15 hour flight landed and that feeling lasted about 24 hours. Thankfully it is gone now - (fyi I had thrown in some Zofran (nausea meds) just in case, (added it to our huge phamacy we were recommended to bring) and it is what finally took away the nausea! For those traveling soon, if you have any leftover Zofran from pregnancy, throw it in!) We left our house at 9am Friday morning and arrived in Beijing at 8:15am Saturday morning your time, Saturday night here. We got to our hotel (1.9 miles from the airport and the taxi tried to charge us $80! I would have gone along with it thinking it was crazy but John talked him down to $40) and got settled in, showered, and tried to sleep. It was night time here but even though sleep deprived it was our morning so it takes some time to adjust to the schedule. We slept from maybe 10 or so til 4:15am and then we were wide awake. We had hoped to make a quick trip to see the Great Wall before flying to Sadie's province but we weren't sure we would be back in time for our flight, or that we would be able to communicate well enough that we and all our luggage would make it where we needed to go, or that we wouldnt be charged crazy amounts by the taxi driver with it being an hour drive! And really, we felt more like resting anyway - we were beat. So we just hung out at the hotel during the morning, and we got to skype with Carter and Myah and my parents, which was nice!

We went to the airport early and were glad we did because the shuttle brought us to the wrong terminal so after running around trying to find the right place and almost getting shoved onto another shuttle without our luggage, we made it to the right place. (Everyone shoves past each other to get anywhere! You have to really fight to get onto elevators, etc). And let me tell you, they keep it blazing hot in all the buildings here and still they stay bundled up! I am glad I brought some short sleeves I can strip down to. Some men in the elevator last night seemed to think that was pretty funny that I was in short sleeves.

Our last flight was just an hour or so and was uneventful. Our guide Lisa met us with our "WISEHART" sign and she is very sweet. The hotel is nice. You wouldn't believe how smoggy it is here - the air is just thick and cloudy. Seems like it would get depressing not being able to see the sun. We started unpacking and were almost settled in when we realized the internet jack in our room didnt work. Trying to communicate with the front desk is interesting as they don't speak English. Thankfully we were told to install some translation apps (Thank you Easleys!!!) and this has been helpful. We will type in a word and it shows up in Chinese and then we play charades to figure out what we are applying that word to. So they told us they were moving us to another room and we very quickly packed back up to move to another room. Just realized I left my perfume in there so we are going to try to go down before breakfast and play charades again to try to find it.

We were told to expect people to stare us down very blatantly and that it would be very uncomfortable. This has happened some, but we were told it gets worse once you have your child. Unfortunately my response to this is to giggle. It's like an involuntary giggle that I can't control. It makes for a really awkward exchange. So hopefully I'll get better at handling this as the week goes on.

There are some very interesting smells here. We are excited to get out and explore, and try some of the noodles with vinegar that Taiyuan is so famous for as well as the tea houses (well, John isnt as excited about the tea houses). We ran to Walmart last night with our guide because my laptop keyboard apparently was damaged in travel even though it was in my carryon. Thankfully we found another keyboard to use. It was such a crazy Walmart - we'll try to take pictures and post them when we have more time.

We are going to head to the hotel breakfast buffet and to make copies of our visas for today and to go in search of my perfume. Oh, and thank you to whichever adoptive family recommended bringing Starbucks VIA and lots of little creamers. We would have been so sad without it :) So families traveling soon, stock up on your little coffees! Next time we write we will have Sadie!!