Saturday, November 7, 2009

The best is yet to come!

I am writing this from the hotel lobby, since the internet connection in our room seems to have been prematurely disconnected.  Side note: there is something just not right about hearing instrumentals from "The Sound of Music" while sitting in a Beijing hotel!

We have met up with three other couples from our adoption agency.  Two of them have already been united with their children.  Kim and I, plus one other couple, remain.

We have discovered that, out of the four families, we will have the most in-China travel.  This tests our stamina.  But I am also glad about it because it means that we will see the more of this enormous (and interesting) country.

Today we all went to see The Great Wall.  We were escorted Joy, our tour guide.  (Kim and I had our picture taken with her in one of the photos above.)  The Great Wall was really amazing.  It is hard to imagine the effort necessary to build and maintain that wall over many centuries.  It is also sad to realize that the Great Wall, for all its might, failed more than once to keep the barbarians out of the Emperor's domain.  It made me think about how some things are inevitable, no matter what great lengths we go to to prevent them.

So after a long (and sleepy) bus ride back to the hotel we came into the lobby to find ShiYan (another one of the guides) with details regarding the next steps in our journey.  We had to jump into action and begin preparations for our departure tomorrow.  We'll leave the hotel at 6:30 a.m. to travel by air to Shen Yang.  In less than 48 hours, we will finally, FINALLY meet Jonathan.

The tourist stuff has been nice, but this is the main event for us.  I won't kid you, we are tired.  We have moments of self-doubt (do we really know what we are doing?)  But we are excited too, we are learning a great deal, and we are very happy to be making a big difference in the life of one little boy.

That is about as good a write up as I can muster right now.  I need to go help Kim pack.

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