We have arrived in Changsha, Hunan, China- our child’s province. And I have internet again, so I am trying to catch up a little bit. They will load her up tomorrow morning and begin a 4.5 hour drive from Chenzhou to Changsha and we are expecting to see her about 2:45p our time, so hopefully when you all wake up tomorrow we will already have her in our arms.

Our group from Hong Kong, some people will continue to Changsha with us while others will go to Fuzhou. We will all meet back in Guangzhou in about a week. Our Fuzhou friends have received their daughters today, we are so excited for them and can’t wait to see blog updates! We are actually sort of relieved we have to wait until tomorrow because it gave us a chance to adjust to the new hotel and we have actually had a couple of technical problems with the room so it was good we didn’t have the extra stress. I think that we are as ready as we can/are going to be. Here is a picture of all 3 groups leaving Hong Kong.

Take 1/3 of these people and we are quite the group walking around the streets of Changsha, I think there are 26 people here. Due to a, well for now we will just call it a “misunderstanding”, of which there seems to be several issues that our agency has seemingly not properly communicated to it’s clients before they arrived in China, we had to go buy formula. There were probably 20 of us walking the streets of Changsha headed to the local Whacko market. First off our guides tell us since Changsha is not much of a tourist destination that many of the Chinese here have not seen Caucasian people before so as we walk the streets we do get many stares, mostly from the younger people. Then all of a sudden you have 20 of us walking into a little local market maybe 30 feet wide and 100 feet long all looking for baby formula and any other baby supplies we might need, I think we overwhelmed the system. Our guides were talking to the clerks in the frantic way that Chinese do and then there was a bunch of hollering from front to back, staff scattering, and then suddenly enough stuff started appearing. The only thing that could not be found it baby bottles, but I think everyone is set until we make our Walmart run on Wednesday.

And a couple random pictures:

Sunrise after 4 hours of darkness on our flight from JFK to HKG:

And Susan, this one is for you- just proof of me working just for you

Our guides took us to a local restaurant for dinner tonight and ordered us meal similar to a traditional Chinese New Year meal, with dumplings, pork, beef (some very spicy), peppers, and the list goes on. Food is very good here, I think what I have noticed is that the Chinese do not cover all their food with salt but instead use other spices and seasonings to enhance the flavors. Very good cuisine and I am looking forward to hopefully getting some more interesting local fare before we leave.