Dec. 13th - Kunming!!!! (from Cheryl)

Well, here we are in Kunming!!! We are in the same city as our daughters!!!

We had an early morning - we had to have our bags outside our doors at 6:30am, and be on the bus by 6:45am. After another thrilling ride through Beijing traffic, we unloaded at the airport and said goodbye to our driver and to our guide, Laurence. We had a few tense moments at the baggage checkin as we all held our breaths as our bags were weighed (44 lb limit per bag) but as a group we came in under weight. We had a few more breathless moments as Amy was summoned behind the counter to open her suitcase and explain a suspicious looking umbrella. But we got through security and onto the plane for the three hour flight to Kunming.

At the airport, we were met by Sarah, our guide for this beautiful city. It is such a contrast to Beijing! Kunming is bright (and warm!!!) and colorful, with flowers everywhere. Traffic is much lighter, and the pace much frenzied than the big city of Beijing. It is nicknamed "the city of flowers" and "the city of eternal spring".

The hotel we are staying in is gorgeous - it is on the shore of Green Lake, and surrounded by wonderful streets full of small shops and restaurants and vendors. We settled in to our rooms and our suitcases exploded all over our room, as we are going to be here for a week. There is a small wooden crib in the corner of the room, next to my bed, with a little pillow and quilt!!! And a stroller was delivered to the room this afternoon while I was transforming my diaper bag from a laptop carrier to back to a diaper bag!

We had a meeting at 4:30 in Dr. Susan's room to go over the procedures for tomorrow and what papers to bring, what money, gifts, etc. Then we walked through the neighborhood shops to a restaurant where we ate our last dinner as childless people! Now we're back in our rooms, and Laurie and I are catching up on the computer.

For some reason we can't get to the blog site ourselves on a regular basis, and we haven''t seen the blog itself since entering China. We think there may be internet filtering going on. We will send our posts to a couple of friends who will load them up for us until we can get online ourselves.

Tomorrow is the day!!! We leave at 7:40am to go to the Civil Affairs Bureau, where we will meet our daughters. We are the only group doing paperwork tomorrow morning, so it should be quality time with the officials! We will spend several hours there getting to know our daughters, asking questions of the orphanage director, and processing paperwork, and then we will be back to the hotel by noon for a free afternoon on our own. Kaeli and Laurie and I will use the time to get over the culture shock and life change chaos (hopefully!), and then we met as a group of parents and their children for our first dinner together!

The schedule for the rest of the time here in Kunming is half days of sightseeing with a half day of free time. I think Laurie will spend a lot of her free time running around the lake, and I will spend it trying to convince Kaeli that I'm not some evil-looking foreign monster (the Chinese nickname Americans "big noses"). Wish me luck!!!