Day 4: The most awesome day ever for us - GOTCHA DAY

Our little Cherry Blossom is here! She has done really well after having to wait a long time at the Registration office and having to ride in a van for a very long time. Right now The Rock is playing with her so that I can write this and then she and I are going down for a nap. I will try to do another blog later tonight with all of the details.

She is definitely showing her personality and she has us both wrapped around her little fingers. We feel so blessed right now! Here are some pictures that sum up our entire day from arriving to the orphanage all the way until now when The Rock is playing with her.


Thank you for all of the Facebook messages, prayers and support! God has blessed us with an amazing little girl!

Day 3: Chinese Acrobat Show (3 of 3 posts)

To end our day our guide Tom took us to a Chinese Acrobat show. It was amazing, but I was kind of disturbed by how many people spoke and/or moved around in the theatre during the show. Below are some pictures of the amazing fetes we saw at the show. Our two favorites was the young man who kept building a tower of chairs and was almost up to the ceiling balancing himself on his arms, legs and the actual chairs. The other favorite was the big metal mesh ball that started off with one motorcyclist doing tricks in it and then kept adding one after one motorcyclist until there was 8 of them in there together. I was so scared they would crash! They didn't and it was so neat to see!

After this I am going to pack a diaper bag and go to bed. When we wake up it is GOTCHA DAY!

Day 3: The Great Wall (2 of 3 posts)

Today was definitely an adventure at the Great Wall of China! The cool thing was that we took a chair lift up to the wall which gave us a bird's eye view of the valley. I was not sure how I would do with this, but it wasn't really that bad. The Rock had planned on video recording it, but realized half way up the mountain that his battery was almost dead so we had to settle for pictures today. When we got to the wall we were amazed by the structure, the history and the amount of stairs that were on the wall.

As we went from one tower to another there were many slopes, hills and stairs. When I say stairs, I mean steps that may be two inches at one point then up to two feet at other points. We were able to climb to the top of one of the towers and look down the side of the wall. It is amazing that this was built by many men without machines in the 15th century. It was built to protect their capital, Beijing, from invaders and it is huge!

We did the Mutianyu portion of the Great Wall, which includes 22 total watchtowers. We did four of these watchtowers, but they are over 150 yards apart with a lot of steps. Halfway through our trek I realized that they did not include "Toilets" on the Great Wall and we had to find one. This was my first, and hopefully last, experience with the "Squatty Toilet" (picture below). We had to go down the wall at a farther location to find a restroom and then back up to the wall. My legs and knees were tired, and then I stepped in a hole. Down I went on my knee and twisted my ankle. I realized that a klutz like me probably did not need to do a bunch of the watchtowers and four of them was good :) After spending a couple hours trekking the wall we were able to come down the mountains on toboggan. That was really fun since I was able to control this little car down a half pipe all the way down. However, I kept being worried that I would go off the track or rear ended by my husband that drives really fast. We made it down safely though!

Once we got down we decided to shop a little from the townspeople who set up stalls at the beginning of the wall. I was going to leave the bartering to The Rock, but realized after we paid way to much for a souvenir that I should have done what my momma taught me, shop around and then buy. These sellers would write down the price of the item in Yuan, Chinese Currency, and then we would come back at a lower price while trying to do the math in our head. The first item we bought The Rock should have bartered a lot lower and then walked away when she said no. I learned from this experience and when I find a Cherry Blossom dress for our Cherry Blossom I knew I was not going to pay more then $10 dollars for it. The first price she gave me was 280 yuan, or roughly $48. There was no way I was paying that much so I said my price ($10), said no when she kept going down from her original price, but not enough and then walked away. She chased me down, I got my way and even bought another one in a different size. I only paid $8 or $9 each and saved $40 each. These sellers should have known that they are dealing with the Coupon Queen and I like to save money! From now on, it looks like I will be doing the bartering instead of The Rock :)

There are many pictures below. We both took many more, but I'm realizing that tomorrow is Gotcha Day and I really need to get Cherry Blossom's things together for in the morning.

Day 3: The Jade Factory (1 of 3 posts)

This morning we woke up knowing that we were making a trip to the Great Wall of China. (This will be the next post) Little did we know that our guide, Tom, had a couple additions to our plans including a Jade Factory/Museum. As a person who likes to mentally plan my day out in advance this was at first difficult since I was not sure if we had brought enough money to buy jade and this might be the only time we have a guide with us to help us barter.

Needless to say we had a great experience at the Jade Museum/Store and even bought some things. Of course our salesgirl "Lisa" was really good at selling and knew that The Rock was an easy pushover when it came to symbolism of money. She told him the story of the Pixiu, which is mythical creature that will bring wealth. We now have a small jade statue of a Pixiu, but if you come to our house to see it please do not touch its mouth or eyes because the wealth could go away. We do not want that :)

I on the other hand had seen a lot of information about the family jade balls from various families that had adopted from China. These balls symbolize our grandparents as the outer ball, our parents as the next inner ball, The Rock and I as the third inner ball and then the final ball enveloped by all of these represents Cherry Blossom. They were having a "Sale" on these because it was after the Chinese New Year, and of course I am a sucker for sales! After bartering "Lisa" also threw in a jade statue of a tiger for Cherry Blossom since she was born in the year of the tiger. She laughed when we told her that The Rock was also the year of the tiger and I am the year of the dragon. She says that we must be a very strong-minded family, very true :)


Here are some pictures from our experience at the Jade Museum.
1) This is the artisan carving one of the family balls. It takes him 7 days to complete just one ball.
2) I of course loved the Cherry Blossom tree made out of jade but since it cost over a thousand dollars I just took a free picture :)
3) Our purchases of the day.
4) The oriental pictures covering the museum walls
5) various statues/vases created out of jade that were pretty go look at but not enough to buy :)

Day 2: Jianguo Hotel in Beijing

We have pretty much stayed in the hotel all day! We did get some sleep last night, but our bodies are still trying to recover. We have both found ourselves taking naps today and then waking up with headaches. In between our big breakfast and our naps we have tried to unpack the room we are staying in for 9 more days. We found out that since we are in an Executive Suite we are able to go get "snacks" from 6-8 in the Executive Lounge. Snacks in China are a whole lot different then snacks in the U.S. We could have just eaten our whole meal in there and it would have been included in our room price. There was all types of fish, chicken, dumplings and other things I was not willing to try. However, the Rock felt like we should find an authentic Chinese restaurant for our first whole day in China, so we did.

The first one we came to there was no English words on the menu in the window and it did not look crowded, so I vetoed that restaurant. The second one had menu with English on their window so we decided to try it. The menu was in both Chinese and English, but the waitresses do not speak both. It was pretty much point at picture and hope for the best. They just laughed at us when I tried to eat with my chopsticks. The Rock did get to try some steamed dumplings, but we realized that we should have ordered just one plate of sweet and sour chicken and shared it. We had way too much food left over!

We are headed to bed again. We are excited to be going to the Great Wall tomorrow, but Monday is really the day we are counting down to. Two more sleeps until we have Cherry Blossom!

Day 1: Beijing

It is after midnight here and we are getting ready to crash! We are exhausted after our long trip and are glad to be in our daughter's city. We have a great guide, Tom, who will be with us the eleven days that we are in Beijing. It was kind of scary when we got off the plane in a strange country, went through customs, got our bags and Tom was nowhere to be found at the front of airport. When you are surrounded by Asian men you keep looking for a guy holding a sign with our last name. Plus, I was frantic because I could not get the VPN to work in the airport so I could not find the email with his phone number in it. Just as The Rock found the email on his phone (after searching the entrances for 15-20 minutes) he found us! We were very relieved!

What we learned about Beijing from Tom is:

1. There are 20,000,000 people in Beijing and about half of those live downtown in these high rise apartments they keep adding onto.
2. Apparently Friday night is the night when everyone goes out to dinner and parties because traffic was horrendous!
3. Many of the drivers drive like The Rock, no signals when changing lanes, flashing their headlights when someone is going to slow and just weaving in and out of the lanes. I was constantly hitting The Rock because I could barely watch where the driver was going.
4. English is the #2 spoken language in the city. We had no problem maneuvering around the airport because everything was in English.
5. The new elected government officials take office next week, so Beijing will be highly protected from their police officers because of this event.
6. During the past two weeks 9,000,000 people left Beijing to go home to their provinces for Chinese New Year. Apparently traffic was great while they were gone!

We cannot wait to see Beijing in the daytime when we have more energy.

A day (or two) of flying

We are happy to say that we have made it to Seoul Korea and we have only one more plane ride to go.  We left Thursday morning at 6:45am and are now sitting in Korea and it is Friday 5pm.  Thankfully we were not on the plane for over 24 hours but it definitely felt like it!


Our trip began in Nashville where Cherry Blossom's grandpa dropped us off at the airport 4:45 am.  Molly Moo, our oldest Boston Terrier, also got to go along for the ride since she is staying with Grandma and Grandpa these next two weeks.  Our first "uh oh" happened while we were checking in.   I knew that one of our three suitcases that we were checking in was heavy, but I was hoping the fee would not be too bad.  Unfortnately for us, Korean Air's limit is 50 lbs and one of our suitcases was 57lbs.   Instead of the fee being prorated we found that the fee was $100 whether you are one pound over or 20 pounds over.   Of course I told "The Rock" that if that was the case I could have left all of the stuff that I took out yesterday to make it lighter :)   Thankfullly,  this was our only uh oh with our luggage.  We are knocking on wood that it will show up in Beijing!

We have gone through security three times now and we are sitting in our third airport.  Our 13 hour flight was definitely harder then we thought it would be.  Of course I thought that I was going to sleep most of it, but that didn't happen.  We were blessed that we had three seats to ourselves and did not have to sit right next to someone.  We each had our own TVs and we caught up on a lot of movies.  There just happened to be a lot of children on the plane and one little girl was not happy 80% of the flight.   Her poor mom,  all she did was cry and scream the whole time.  It was very hard to sleep through this and her mother just looked worn out.  We also had a little girl in front of us who kept saying Hi! to us and waving.  All I could think of was that in a couple of weeks that will be our Cherry Blossom on the plane with us.  I definitely hope we have the experience of the mom in front of us instead of the mom with the crying/screaming child :)


We hope to send out a short blog tonight when we get to Beijing just to let everyone know we made it.  Tomorrow is a day of rest to recover from our flight so we will stay around the hotel.  I'm anxious to get some sleep and unpack!