Day 3 arrival in Zhengzhou

It was an early morning and boy am I dragging right now so I'm struggling to inform!  We have moved roughly 430 miles southwest of Beijing to the capital of the Henan province. We come to Zhengzhou because some of the adoption documents need to be notarized by the official notary officer of the province that is only here I guess.  At least that's the way I understand the process.  It may become more clear when we go through it all and fill out the paperwork tomorrow.  Laine will be coming down from her home city of Anyang.  That is about 120 miles north of Zhengzhou.   A single representative from the orphanage will bring her down to us.  All 8 families in our group will go to the Civil Registration office at 9:30 Monday morning for us or 8:30 Sunday night for you in the eastern time zone. 

 

We are staying at the Crowne Plaza hotel here.  Its one of two five star hotels in town our guide says.  So far its a noticeable difference from Beijing on several levels.  The air is much more polluted.  I'd say very smoggy.  I have not been in any US city that is this bad, not even close really.  The air just smells smokey when you walk outside.  I think eye drops will be in order soon.  Also the people are much less used to seeing foreigners.  Lots of stares here where we rarely got a second glance in Beijing.  Much less English spoken in turn as well. We will be here until Friday when we move on to Gungzhou.   Ok where was I, been counting money for the gifts for orphanage workers and many fees as well.  Christina has just returned from the Walmart and is in the nesting phase!  Getting the room all ready, the hotel staff just brought in the crib too.  She just said holy crap, we get a baby tomorrow!

 

I didn't get a chance to write about some things she saw last night on a trip to the mall just down from our hotel in Beijing.  She took some neat pictures of  the foods available.  Like the 10 dollar box of Cheerios!  Guess it was cheaper to bring it with us!  Other families have told us it was difficult to find the name brands from home, but more and more seem to be popping up.  She found several in a new store in Beijing.  I'll include some of those pictures.  We had dinner from McDonald's too.  Tasted just like home and the store was so packed she had to get it to go, no-where to sit down. She also went to starbucks.  Other families walked through the night market where you could get snake on a stick,  scorpion surprise and block the children's eyes....sheep's penis.  They tried to get some photos but were yelled at! 

 

Traveling here this morning was pretty easy.  We were really worried about the weight of our luggage but our guide acted fast and quickly saw we were going to be over so he collected every ones passports and got the airline to average all the bags together and we didn't end up with an extra charge.  Going through security I got stopped with all the camera gear but they x-rayed it a couple times and then very carefully helped me put it back in my bag!  U.S. it would be grab it and get out of my way!  We flew on China Southern Airlines to get here.  A 737 with plenty of room really and very clean too.  Just looked up Zhengzhou and in 2007 the population was over 7.3 million!   Its much more industrial than Beijing. The roads are just as busy with the sidewalks even more so!  The roads aren't quite as wide and they don't seem to have the bike lanes Beijing did so the bikes and more importantly the scooters are on the sidewalks!  So you have to be very cautious to not get hit from behind.  You just can't hear the scooters coming. 

 

I just took some pictures of our room.  Its much like the last, two beds and they are I guess somewhere between a full and a twin, not big enough for us to sleep together.  And very hard too, Chinese traditionally like the hard low bed.  These are maybe 18 inches off the floor.  But we have a little bump out section with a window and that is where we put the crib.

The bath is nice but uses really low flush volume toilets so you are not supposed to flush any toilet paper, just throw it away! HMMMM that will be interesting!  We've got more tv channels here, about 8 English speaking it looked like with HBO.  The bedside even has this master control center that turns all the lights on or off, plays music and rings the front desk!  So I guess we are ready.  We'll find out how ready in about 15 hours!  I just added on about 21 photos, some are from last night and then the plane is the first from today, that is ours on the ground here in Zhengzhou, followed by the airport and some of the city smog and our room.  We don't have 3G cell service here so not sure if I'll be able to check to amke sure these post so someone email if they don't post correctly.