6000 miles and a day: And we're back!

We're home!!
Wow what a crazy 2 weeks it was! The trip had many ups and downs, but overall it was an amazing and life changing experience.
We're going catch everyone up by blogging about our trip over the next week or two. We want to make sure we write all of the details down before the sleep deprivation makes us forget! We also plan on making Milo a photo book detailing our journey to becoming a family, so these posts will help us organize our thoughts.

As we mentioned in this post, packing for this trip was crazy! Even with a mile long packing list, I still felt like we didn't have everything. And then we went to pack it all into 2 suitcases (each under 44 pounds) and 2 carry ons and of course it didn't fit. After much reorganizing and frustration, we decided that we would pay the extra fees to have a 3rd checked bag. It was worth it to us to feel like we had everything we might need. As it turned out, we didn't have to pay a single fee for any of our checked bags! I don't know if it was because we were traveling internationally or because we told people we were adopting, but we really lucked out. The only downside was having to carry all of those bags through customs, airports, a train and hotels. It really upped the difficulty when we added Milo to the mix, but we made it work!

One of these bags would not make the return trip home, stay tuned to find out the story!

Our first plane ride of the trip left early morning on April 18. We left Denver (with an emotional goodbye and a heartwarming prayer) and flew to Seattle. We had a 4 hour layover, which gave us plenty of time to relax and grab lunch. We got our boarding passes for the flight to Beijing and the airline folks gave us an emergency exit row, which was awesome for leg room! The flight to Beijing was 11 hours and surprisingly went by quickly. We flew on a Dreamliner (very jealous of anyone who can afford first class on these planes, it looked amazing!!) so there were individual screens for each seat and there were no less than 30 movies and tv shows. The food was.....interesting. As it was a Chinese airline (Hainan Airlines), the food (and announcements) were more Chinese than American. There was a lot of noodles, rice and bowls of stuff we didn't recognize, but it was all fairly good for airplane food.

We arrived in Beijing around 5 pm (China time, which is 14 hours ahead of Mountain time. It was very tricky to keep that time difference in my head while we were away). We had another long layover, but the extra time came in handy as we had to go through customs, pick up our checked bags, recheck them and then find our gate.

We finally arrived in Changsha at 10:30 PM on April 19. Thankfully we had arranged transport to the hotel as it was obvious we weren't in an English speaking country anymore. It was our first taste of riding in a car in China, which is CRAZY! Lots of honking, cutting off other cars and ignoring stop signs. We heard that driving was very different in China, but it's truly something you have to see to believe!
Our hotel (Huatian hotel) was very nice, although we were starting to learn that Changsha was not a city often visited by English speaking folks as very few of the hotel staff or public spoke English. By the end of that week we got very good at pointing and hand gestures.We did learn that many Chinese schools are teaching kids both English and Mandarin, which is very impressive. We are hoping Milo will take an interest in learning Mandarin and we can all learn some together.

The next day was free for us to explore Changsha. We didn't feel jet lagged at all, which was awesome! Our hotel had a breakfast buffet that had mostly Chinese options (fried rice and noodles, congee, pork blood, salad, steamed veggies that were foreign to us, steamed rolls, etc) and luckily a few more familiar options (yay for toast with peanut butter!). The rest of the day we wandered the streets around our hotel. Changsha is a really interesting city. Lots of small (like the size of a walk in closet small) shops and restaurants. There were very few signs in English. We tried to eat at a noodle restaurant next to our hotel, but even with the help of pictures we weren't able to figure out what anything was! We felt very safe walking around, even at night. We also got our first taste of the attention we would get in our 2 weeks in China. Many folks would stop to look at us on the street. Some people (especially teenagers and children) tried out their English by saying Hi to us. It was so sweet! We learned Mandarin for hello (Ni Hao) and loved interacting with the locals!

The next day was "gotcha day" where we met Milo, which deserves its own post! More to come!

Our first dinner at the "food street" at the hotel. It was an a la carte buffet with very few things we recognized, but there were a few things we enjoyed!