Flying and Beijing, Day1

In less than two hours, we'll be boarding a bus to take us to the Nanjing Civil Affairs office to get Eli, and now that I've figured out a makeshift way to blog without my VPN, I decided I needed to get this part of the story down before the vacation ends and the real fun begins.

On Wedesday morning, we drove to the airport, and brought Annie and Maren, who sobbed the whole way. Then we boarded a plane for San Francisco, and another plane for Seoul. Flying Korean was very comfortable. We had lots of leg room, and they had a bunch of Disney movie options for Rose, which kept her from being hysterical for all but about 90 minutes of the 13 hour flight. A four year old boy kicked my seat the whole flight, but I was so happy to be on my way to my own little boy that even that was tolerable. However, she only slept about two hours. We had a two hour layover, but security took so long that we ended up running through the massive Seoul airport to make our Beijing connection. It was there that we met the Codes, our first fellow adopters of the couple dozen families from our Facebook group who will be here this week. We finally arrives, got settled, and crashed in our beds around 11 Thursday night. Poor Rose was just exhausted.

On Friday morning we headed out to the great wall. I'm typical Shelah and Terry fashion, we opted not for the easy side, but headed right for the hard side, where w climbed 1,416 steps up and 1,416 steps down. It felt more like 14,000 steps with the baby strapped to my front and a pack on my back, and I'm still sore three days later, but it really was an incredible experience.

Later that day we visited the jade factory and had a delicious lunch. We were so lucky because I thought we were going to be all on our own with a guide, but apparently both Wacap and CCAI contract with the same guides, so we were with a group of about ten wonderful families, which made the experience even more fun. We capped off the afternoon with the longest bus ride ever, which took us past the bird's nest and other sites from the Beijing Olympics.