Trip Summary - en route to China!

Here's a picture of me the night before we left for China -- mass chaos in trying to pack everything we need into two suitcases weighing no more than 44 lbs each (the in-China weight restrictions for flying). Not an easy feat as I'm sure the medicines for 'just in case' weighed almost that much!

Neil and I left Canada on Tuesday, October 25th (the rest of our adoption group – 13 families - caught up with us in Changsha on Sunday, October 30th). We arrived in Beijing at 2:00 p.m. the next day, very tired as you can imagine, whereupon we were to transfer to another flight to take us to Sammie’s city, Changsha. When we got to Beijing, we were directed to a different exit than most of our fellow passengers. We had inadvertently declared bringing in more money than we actually were carrying (we had each declared the amount that we were bringing in as a total); however, other than having us exit a different way, there were no interrogations or anything. What did cause a problem though was that there was no one at this exit to greet us. Being a little worried, I decided to pull out my ‘travel file’ to review exactly what our adoption agency had told us about being met at this airport. Lo and behold, guess what was the one thing that I had forgotten….my travel file. Panic stations for a moment or two as we had nothing with emergency contact names, tel numbers, etc. (ie. not of family members but of adoption-related people)!! So, we found a place to have a cigarette and figure things out. We then went off in search of someone, anyone who could speak English to help us out. Nope. Nada. No English thank you very much. We wandered around this huge airport until we found the exit we should have come out of and thankfully found our guide holding a big sign for us. Much relief at this point as she had our tickets to Changsha. (Thank goodness for the guides that our adoption agency, Children's Bridge, provided as they were such wonderful people in every respect. I simply cannot imagine this trip without them!) We had a two-hour wait until our two-and-a-half hour flight to Changsha, a small town of seven million people (!). We arrived in Changsha and our hotel without further adieu.