1. Greetings, Family and Friends. From the Holiday Inn in downtown Beijing. It's Friday morning [Sept. 3).
I've read, but not closely, about Google and China friction and find that I can't use Google Blogger here, so it's back to e-mail. I'll try not to overload your Inboxes with reports and pictures over the next two weeks. But, please be forewarned and have your finger poised over the Delete key.
I've read, but not closely, about Google and China friction and find that I can't use Google Blogger here, so it's back to e-mail. I'll try not to overload your Inboxes with reports and pictures over the next two weeks. But, please be forewarned and have your finger poised over the Delete key.
Update (Sept. 24, 2010): Now that we're home again I'm converting our e-mail to blog postings - for the sake of posterity. Hope it works.
Susie and I flew to Denver on Tuesday, spent a short night at Mandi and Paul's, then rendezvoused with Jeff, Valerie, and Malia at the Denver airport at 4am Wednesday for our 6am flight to San Francisco. We arrived in SFO about 730, checked the board and found that our scheduled noon flight to Beijing had been delayed by three hours. We took over (squatted on and spread out on) a quiet corner of a waiting area and filled the time reading, playing games, walking, eating, web-surfing, DVD-movie-watching, chatting, ... . The time just flew by. Here some thrilling airport scenes (I'm wearing Malia's hat).
The flight to Beijing is a mere 12.5 hrs. If I've figured it right, we'll get in late in the afternoon, 9/2.
Our travel agent booked Susie and me into an aisle and a window seat following a strategy that the middle seat between us would be one of the last assigned and would therefore likely be empty or, if assigned, one of us could trade places with the interloper so that we could be side by side. So, we settled in with Susie on the aisle, me by the window. Guy showed up with the middle seat assignment. Susie had already said, Let's don't swap -- let's keep the aisle and window seats. So, guy took his seat. Susie and I were visiting and guy realized we were together and offered to trade one of us seats. No, thanks, we said. He looked a bit skeptical about that. Doors closed and Susie looked around and saw that there was an empty aisle seat a couple rows back. She told the guy between us and he quickly moved into it. So, all three of us ended up winners thanks to two strategies. Win/win/win!
Flight time from SFO to Beijing was 12.5 hrs. With seven hours of practice behind us, we whiled away those hours and landed in Beijing at about 6:00 pm, exactly 24 hrs. after arriving at the Denver airport. Incidentally, about a year ago Susie got me a gift card at Border's with the expectation that I would buy one of their Kindle-like e-readers. I had procrastinated (goes against my library ethos), but for this trip I used the gift card to get a Kobo e-reader. It's a slim little thing (about 5x7 in.), pre-loaded, free, with 100 classics (not copyright-protected) and I had bought and downloaded a couple of cheap e-books. That served me well and I spent quite a bit of the time between meals reading an early Agatha Christie mystery.
There were two other adoption-family clusters on our flight. We were met by our CCAI (Chinese Children Adoption International) guide, George, and bused to the Holiday Inn.
Our two days in Beijing are primarily to give us time to adjust to jet lag – get us on the same clock as the babies -- and acclimate ourselves to the China scene with some tourism activities before getting into the main event of adopting our little girls [note added: one of our group’s adoptees is a little boy]. Today we're going to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tomorrow the Great Wall. Back to you soon with pictures and tales.
Cheers,
Susie and Rob, faithful companions of Jeff, Valerie, Malia, and, soon, Macy
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