Brooklyn's New Beginnings

Welcome to our travel blog. Come with us to China as we become a family of four.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Departing night, August 23rd, 2006




As promised, I am going to chronicalize our days in China. Not only because I was a lousy blogger while in China (imagine that!), but i also need to write everything down before i start forgetting some of the details. First off, that picture of me? Gorgeous, but totally not staged. I really was that delirious from lack of sleep. It wouldn't be right for you all to see me in all my glory in the coming pictures w/o seeing this treasure.
It was the longest flight of my life. In Dallas our flight was delayed by 2 hours. The stupid plane finally arrived, and I have to give the flight crew credit. They cleaned up that plane and we were on the runway in 10 minutes after the people coming into Dallas unloaded. I've never seen anything like that before. I was nervous that we were going to miss our flight to China. Thankfully we arrived at LAX about 45 minutes before the flight took off.
We met several other families on the flight that were also going to adopt a child and had opted to take a Beijing excursion instead of going straight to the child's province. It was nice getting to meet people that I had actually "met" online several months before. It was also the first time I had ever met a Buddhist monk and nun. They were on their way to Lhasa, Tibet and I was SO jealous. I enjoyed getting to talk with them a bit.

We landed in Guangzhou after a total of 21 hours of flying, not including layovers. Not so much fun being stuck in a tin can that long buzzing high over the Pacific ocean. Thankfully we paid $500 more per seat to take Business Economy. I seriously could not imagine being in coach that entire time.

It took forever to go through customs and get our bags. We had one more flight to catch- to Beijing, another 3 hours. I was exhausted but knew this was the last one.

A young man that worked with the airport came up and offered to show us to the other flight since it was clear across the airport. He walked so fast that I was getting pissed. I finally told him bluntly that he doesn't need to jog a marathon since I was running on 36 hours straight of being awake. We finally got to our desination and he said it would be $20. I about told him to go to hell, but since I was making sure we had all of our 80 bags and our son, Edward gave him the money. I then agreed with his decision that he likely needed it more than we did. We sucked up our loss and learned our lesson.

The next few hours were a blur from the severe sleep deprivation. All I remember was being relieved to see a woman holding a sign with our name on it. I vaguely remember walking into the hotel at 1:00 p.m., but do remember all of us completely crashing on the beds. I literally fell on the bed and about broke my chin.....i had forgotten that people warned of chinese beds- hard as cement. Nice. We woke up at 4:00 a.m. the next morning but we were completely on Chinese time at that point and we were very pleased. The itinerary timing I intentionally set up this way had actually paid off.