Sunday, April 8, 2012

April 7, 2012

April 7, 2012

We arrived in China yesterday afternoon, two hours later than we were scheduled. The flight out of Chicago had a mechanical problem, and we sat on the tarmac for an hour before take-off, after a six hour layover in Chicago. The flight
s themselves were rather uneventful. About 3 hours before landing (it was a 14 hour flight) I suddenly got hot and felt sick, which had me worried, but then I was ok. John slept for 5-6 hours on the flight, and Ben slept for maybe three hours. David and I slept very little and arrived hot and tired. Our guide, Cindy, who is maybe 25 years old, escorted us to the van, and we rode 45 minutes to our hotel.  By then, we’d been traveling for 26 hours straight, so we just walked to a restaurant across from the hotel.  It was a Chinese fast food type restaurant, and John ordered four dishes for us that he thought might resemble the Chinese food we are accustomed to eating. In other words, we did not have eel, duck feet, or any other unusual or exciting dish. We ate quickly and returned to the hotel for an early bedtime. Of course, I was wide awake at 2:00am, and Ben woke up for the day at 3:00am. I put him in the bath at 4:00am, just to entertain him for awhile so that David and John could “sleep  in.” At 5:00am, after John woke up, I attempted to plug in the hot water pot provided by the hotel. This, in turn, tripped a circuit breaker. Poor Ben was in the dark in the bathroom in the tub, while I scrambled around trying to figure out what to do. David woke up , and using Ben’s game boy as a flash-light, he found the circuit box. Now, at 6:00am, we’ve lost power a dozen times this morning. I don’t know if it’s our particular hotel room, or if it’s a hotel-wide thing. We’re only here for one more night, so we’ll probably just suck it up and pretend we’re camping.

Today we are scheduled to go to John’s orphanage at 9:00am today. He’s excited to go see his friends. We were told yesterday that Ben’s orphanage will not let us visit, but we may try to go anyway. Ben was raised in a foster home for most of his life, and we would love to find out the name and address of the foster family so that we can send the family updates. We were hoping that if we visited the orphanage, we might be able to ascertain some information on the foster family. I’ll write more later;  so far I haven’t been able to access the internet much and this might not get posted on my blog.

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