Arrived in Chengdu

I'm really hoping this works, so someone with my yahoo email address please email me if this posts on our blog - just so I know it worked.  We can't access facebook or our blog here so I'll be emailing all of my posts.

 

Our flights to Dallas, Seattle and Beijing were pretty uneventful.  Our flight to Beijing was about 11 hours and I was SO ready to get off that airplane by the time we landed.  Tim slept on the flight to Seattle and most of the Beijing flight.  I slept maybe 3 or 4 hours on the flight to Beijing.  Oscar didn't sleep at all.

 

Beijing was hot, humid and foggy the one night we were there and the next morning when we left.  I hope the fog leaves by the time we return there to do the touristy things in about 2 weeks.

 

Our flight to Chengdu was supposed to leave around 8:00 am Saturday morning.  We did board on time, but then sat in the airplane for about 2 hours before we took off - looked like a lot of flights were sitting out on the runways waiting to take off due to the fog.  We arrived in Chengdu at about 12:15 pm local time. This is where I did something super stupid and accidently left Oscar's and my passports on the airplane when we got off the plane.  By the time I figured out what I'd done, security wouldn't let Tim get back to the plane to get them.  Stupid.Stupid.Stupid. While we were waiting for our baggage to show up (which it eventually did) I was able to find the person picking us up at the airport and told her what happened and she was able to get the passports back to us before we left the airport for our hostel. Majorly relieved about that huge blessing. You can't do anything without your passport here (including checking into a hotel and of course getting on any airplanes).  And yup, we're staying at a hostel in Chengdu, which is an experience in and of itself. I'll just say it's very hippy/bohemian and leave it at that. The people working here and staying here are generally very friendly though and the location is central and seems to be convenient to getting places around the city.

 

It's 4:30 in the morning here and I just can't sleep.  I'm having a hard time acclimating to the time change. It was foggy in Chengdu when we landed and it has since started raining - and has rained all night. We meet our guide today (Sunday) at around 2:00 pm.  We may also get to meet the other family in Chengdu adopting with our agency.  I have emailed with the dad and they are adopting an 11 year-old boy. We now have less than 30 hours until we pick up SongSong from the CWI (orphanage). I'll try to post more later :).  Hopefully my next post will be more coherent.