Spicy times and Aprilie?

Well we have made it to China safely. Still adjusting to the time difference, which by the way is 13 hours thanks to America's daylight savings. When we get home it will be the first day of daylight savings, so only 12 hours to figure out?!

We left for JFK around 5am and got there by 5:40am. Our wonderful packing session the night before with Grace really helped weed out clothing and we managed to get our suitcases down to around the weight limit (2 bags were 2 pounds over so she waived the fees). The plane left the gate on time but, we got held up in a cue of 17 planes ahead so we finally took off almost an hour later. The flight was very smooth and probably one of the smoothest landings. Was Sully our pilot? There was a picture on the plane of a guy who resembled him. Hmmmm, I wonder.

During the plane ride we had a wide variety of movies, tv shows and games to keep us entertained. Neither of us really got any sleep on the plane. I took a catnap in the middle of a movie, but that was all. My tv set needed to be reset 3 times of course because I have that sort of luck. The really cool thing about the tv screen was that it had this option of seeing our flight pattern and where we currently were and it was constantly updating the local time in our origin, destination and wherever in the world we currently were. It also said the temperature and altitude. FYI: over the arctic circle, it is -56degrees F.

When we arrived in Hong Kong, we had to switch planes to Guangzhou where we would be staying for the night. We will also be there from Saturday the 28th till we leave for the US. The plane ride was only 45 minutes long, but by the time we got on that plane we had already been up for 24 hours straight. I stopped counting how many hours total before we hit the sheets but it was more than enough. At the Gunagzhou airport the bell hops from our hotel were waiting for us to take our bags and get us to the hotel. In Guangzhou we are staying the Westin hotel, which is very nice and modern, maybe too modern though. The shower definitely needed instruction on how to work and it was like a sauna in the hotel room. Turns out people in China have a very different idea of cold than we do. They like their rooms around 25degrees C but they also don’t have winters like we do.

We woke up early to get packing for Chongqing on Sunday because only 1 bag per person for this flight and it could only weigh 44lbs. Thankfully we had a scale and I jumped on and off with the bags to ensure we were under the limit. Once we arrived at Chongqing we were transported by a bus once again to the InterContinental hotel, which is home until Saturday morning. This is when we found out that the Chinese really like things warm and requested that the AC be turned up. Turns out that its central AC for all the hotel guests and it’s a bit of a struggle to keep the entire hotel happy with the temperature. They said that they would get us a cooler and I guess because I was the one who started explaining this to the women at the desk, my name was placed on the work order for our “cooler”. My new Chinese name is Aprilie. And we still don’t quite get how this “cooler” works as all the buttons are in Chinese. We also have the windows open so it seems to be cooling down a little.

We have found the food to be generally more spicy and the tour guide for Chongqing said everything is spicy. There is a KFC and a PizzaHut across the street from the hotel and we chose the KFC for tonights dinner. Even that was more spicy than at home and we even asked the only guy that spoke English in the place which is the least spicy. The language barrier hasn’t been too bad, but of course we have only been here for 2 days, although in my mind everything has been just 1 very long day so the fact that it’s approaching 8pm and tomorrow we meet Megan is crazy.

Chongqing is where the adoption centre is that we will be meeting her at and taking her. Tomorrow around 3pm we meet her and take her back to the hotel with us for the night. Tuesday is when the adoption actually takes place, which barring any huge obstacles, I will be taking a video of it. I will have no way to post that, but there will definitely be a new picture of her tomorrow.

As I have been doing all of the blogging up until now, this has all been Arlie-vision, but Teresa will be getting on here now, so she will be writing posts too. As it's approaching 8pm here I think it's time to sit in bed and watch Chinese tv? We shall give it a try. And figure out how much formula to bring tomorrow. Good night or good morning!