Souvenirs

Alex: 4/10/08
I’ve started a sprite can collection. On the plane I got a sprite can in a foreign language (and a different alphabet). At the hotel, the can was in Chinese.

Similarities and Differences

4/10/08
Jeremiah: Beijing looks a lot like Jacksonville. For instance, there are a lot of tall buildings. The airport we arrived in looked a lot like the Jacksonville airport. But there are a lot of things that make it look different. For example, most of the writing is in Chinese and English. Also it is very crowded. A lot of people ride their bicycles. Some of the bicycles had three wheels. Others carried pizza, luggage, and groceries. There were some cars that were one-seaters and looked like golf carts.

The Plane Ride

4/10/08
Alex: We went on two plane rides. The first was short and the other was 13 hours long. The long plane ride was actually pretty fun. When I played Mario Kart Racing for five hours straight, it didn’t seem so long. Last night I only slept for three hours on the plane, and was up the rest of the time. There was a little girl behind us who was also going to China to get a baby brother. She was 3 and slept with her bare foot sticking up in the air and her sock on her hand!

Our route took us up the coast of America to Alaska, across the Bering Strait and down Siberia. We saw lots and lots of snow and huge mountains of ice floating in the sea.

The Quest

Philip: 4/10/08
All epic journeys are repeats of Odysseus’. Like him, we are involved in a long and perilous journey to the unknown. Ultimately, with our prize achieved (our new daughter), we will attempt a nostos, a return to our familiar home. The trip to Beijing was very much an epic journey. Like any quest into the unknown, it involved stages of increasing strangeness. From the first stage, a simple hop to Charlotte, to the more grueling flight to Los Angeles and an overnight sojourn in a motel near the airport, to the short but stressful flight to San Francisco (with less than an hour to change planes, every minute’s delay threatened disaster), to the final, interminable flight across the Pacific. This last leg, 12 hours in the dubious comfort of economy class, was our trip to the Underworld: we flew to the far edge of the world (passing over the Arctic Circle and the frozen wastes of the Bering Sea and Siberia), with a Disney film as our Tiresias. We are now in Beijing, a city straining to be modern and so presenting an odd mix of the familiar and the strange. What new fantastic experiences confront us?

We are in Beijing!

April 10, 2008
Leslie: We’ve arrived. Like the standing stones, there is no way to keep track of the amount of time we spent traveling today, or rather yesterday/today. We arrived at LAX an hour late, at 10ish instead of 9ish, which was 1ish for us. I know you have to stop counting the old time, but the point is, it was late. We went right to sleep and woke up at 5:30, which left us a little short on sleep, but basically waking up at our usual Jacksonville time. Our short flight from LA to San Francisco arrived early, but then we waited on the runway for ½ hour, so that we still had to sprint to make our connection to the Beijing flight. But we made it, and miraculously, so did our luggage. We spent 13 hours in the air, arriving at 3:45pm local time. The boys were fabulous, and the portable electronic games were a lifesaver. But because it was a day flight, we didn’t get much sleep; no more than about 3 hours each. We were seated next to a couple who were also with our adoption group, and in front of a family with another agency who are also adopting their second child. Now it is almost 8pm local time, and I think that means that we left 24 hours ago. I’m beat. Good night!

We're off!

Leslie: We are in Charlotte. Thank goodness for wireless internet, and the generous technology support from our workplace! When I lived in England, I remember a common tale about small standing stone formations. There are hundreds, maybe thousands in England. Stonehenge is only the most famous. Part of the magic of the smaller ones was that every time you counted the stones, the number was different. You had to use cleverness or your own magic to pin down the number, and that gave you power over the stones.

So our flights are like that: every time I count them, I come up with a different number. We travel for 16 days, and have something like 10-13 different flights. We complete two today, as well as cross 3 of the 12 timezones we have to cross. Tonight is LA.

Halfway around the world

Leslie: I am sure that this is not a shock to anyone but me, but we are going pretty much exactly halfway around the world. I was showing the kids on the globe how far we are travelling, and was startled to see that all that "digging to China" business is geographically correct. It hit home when I started to look into the time change (something I've been in denial about!). It is a 12 hour time change. I don't have to adjust my watch, but day and night are exactly flipped.