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We made it to Urumqi. Noelle did great on that loooonnnnng flight from Newark to Beijing. She played with her new friend, Ludi. Sadly, Ludi’s Dad felt she was bugging us and made her move back to her own seat. Noelle slept for some of the trip (not that much), watched her videos for some of it, colored, ate, etc. She had some bits of anxiety about it all with a couple of “home now?” statements, but all in all did just great.
The night in Beijing went fine. We even managed to get from the airport to the hotel and back again sans guide. It was no White Swan, or even Mirage, but it was OK (a hotel where the shampoo and soap were in squeeze tubs on the wall). We fell into bed at about 7 pm China time (so 6 am Eastern ). Noelle woke up for a bit at midnight, but we kept the lights off and put Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into the DVD player and she watched that until she fell asleep again. Probably up one more that night. Then she was up for good at 4 am. We managed the hotel shutel back to the airport. Noelle looked nervous and Daddy and I wondered if she was having memories of the last time she road a bus like that in China … not the best set of moments in her life.

I had forgotten about the fact that there are no early check-ins allowed at the Beijing airport, so we got there way too early and had to hang around outside the check-in area. We took walks with Noelle upstairs, which is really neat. Lots of fun shops and quiet. The check-in went really well (no extra charges for the luggage!!!). We had some breakfast down by the gate and got into line early so we could get on the plane and get settled first — China boards all flights like Southwest.

Noelle did well on the flight to Urumqi, too. We were way more anamolous on that flight — maybe 10 non-Chinese folks, total. She slept for a lot of it.

We landed in Uruqmi and were met by our guide, Lily. She gave us the low down on where we are staying and our schedule. We are not supposed to go out after dark and we are going to be quite the show stoppers. Well, we certainly weren’t going anywhere today. I couldn’t even take her up on the offer to go to the grocery store on the way to hotel — just needed to get settled. We got all our luggage upstairs (4 big bags for the 4 of us, plus a whole bunch of smaller bags — 1 of the big bags is full of donations to the orphanage and Good Rock and items for kids still waiting for their identified families or from families already home sending info back to the orphanage). Its just as well that we have that extra bag coming back, though, because we need to go shopping for Peng and I think I might need to do some shopping for me (I think I’m going to need another sweatshirt). We certainly are show stoppers, though. We went down for a swim in the pool before dinner and were the center of attention. The blonde lady with the big, 2 year old, Jiangxi beauty who speaks no Chinese. We were surrounded and touched. An Uyghur lady did translating for all the folks who had questions for us.

Our schedule for the week has been rearranged a bit. We are going to do our touring on Tuesday and visist the SWI on Thursday.

Lily will pick us up at 10 am tomorrow to go to Civil Affairs and meet Peng. We’ll finalize the adoption tomorrow afternoon. Sometime between now and then I need to go through my gazillion activities and pick out the right set to bring with us to that meeting. I’m leaning towards bubbles and some car toys, but we shall see.

Tomorrow I change all our lives, forever, when we meet Peng Peng!

(See all photos in the Gallery).

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 8:15 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.