It's been an adventure filled few days since we landed in China Friday night. We all planned to meet at the terminal after collecting luggage. Aimee and Lesley arrived together several hours after Krista. Moya arrived soon after. Unbeknownst to us ( note to self: check this detail in the future) Moya landed at a whole different terminal. So she got a cab to the hotel alone. The driver got lost, pulled over and tried to figure out where to go. Eventually she safely joined the others at the hotel...although for a few minutes, she was worried. Friday morning after a coffee at the nearby Starbucks, we spent time negotiating how to get 400 lbs of donations shipped to the orphanage. We made a new friend in the concierge and eventually all was settled by calling another company. The duffel bags were taped to the top of a vehicle! Here is Krista with said luggage transporter!
The Doubletree was then unable to get us a cab to take us to the train station and told us it would be easier to take the subway. What??!!. So we walked a block to subway and negotiated that. Leslie had her bag lifted and pushed onto the train by an employee at the door was going. We made it to the train station and found our way to our gate. "Quickly, quickly", said the man who checked our ticket. We thought we had almost 15 minutes to our train but the uniformed employee who let us through the gate and ran with us to the train indicated otherwise. We barely made it on the train-car 6 and had to make our way through 5 cars to get to our seats!
A few hours later at 300 km/ph we arrived in Zhengzhou. We got subway tickets and emerged above ground just minutes from our hotel. Whew! We had a lovely dinner at a noodle joint, met a new friend who offered us free translation any time ( she works in sales and manufacturing) and then made a short trip to Wal-Mart. The next morning, we set out to buy some things our OT and PT (Leslie and Aimee!!) need to help our kiddos. QiRui, our room manager, and Yang Yang, the assistant director met us at the hotel to give us a ride to XuChang. There was not enough room in the car so Yang Yang. QiRui and Krista took the fast train. We checked into the hotel with some issue as they wanted twice our week room charge as a deposit and our credit cards were not working. Sigh. Finally my debit card worked and Leslie went with QiRui to 8 banks to get a debit machine to take her card and spit out money.
Finally we went to dinner down the street for some delicious hot pot. We were surprised to see a robot delivering food! Tomorrow we are very excited to head to the orphanage and meet "our" kids.
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