Trip to China
All Days  |  Next Day

Sunday, September 16, 2007 My goodness, look where we are. We made it to GuiYang, feeling like we've both been rode hard and put away wet. Eyes sunken into the back of our heads. We've gotten pretty good at this whole travel thing, so the getting' here just wasn't as difficult as I had anticipated. In fact, our hard work happened before we got on that plane and is probably about to start again in just a few hours. Our guide, Michael, is pleasant and will certainly be our lifeline while we're here. English is not widely spoken here and he chuckles when we ask what language they do speak. We know it's not Mandarin or Cantonese. Regardless, we don't know it and we aren't going to know it anytime soon. It's warm and muggy here. Michael said that one of the terms for this province means "very expensive sun", which means they get just about as much sun as we get back in Portland. It was dark when we flew in, but we could tell from our drive in from the airport that it's a very hilly region. I'm excited to see where we are when we wake up in the morning. Speaking of which....we meet Nola at 8am tomorrow morning. (!) I don't know what time that is for y'all but I do know that we're 16 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time. I'm astounded at how I've been keeping it together so far. What's up with that? I figure I'm about to lose it any second now. Eric and I talked a lot about her on the flight over. Conversations like, "Do you know how to change a diaper?" "No. Do you?" "Nope." "Hmmmm..." It sounds like some people will be bringing her to us here at the hotel. We don't know if the foster parents will be with her, but we certainly hope so. So we'll be meeting our daughter in the lobby of the Best Western. It's the new old-fashioned. There's a crib in our room, and a baby bathtub (but I might still use the inflatable duck tub that we brought) and they loaned us a stroller. We have diapers, Cheerios, formula, rice cereal, and these little organic fruit snacks. We have different kinds of sippy cups and a couple of different kinds of bottles (including the Habermeyer for cleft palates). We have cute clothes, bibs, an inflatable ball, a blankie with pink skulls, a cool stuffed pig, and finger puppets. I think we're set. Oh, and there's us. Two anxious parents-to-be, hoping that our love will make up for our lack of know-how. Thanks so much for all of your kind and supportive words. We can read them all from over here, and it just means so much to have you with us for this. You're our village. Now we gotta go and get some shut-eye (yea right). We've got a big day tomorrow.

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