Travel Dates

We finally heard from our agency this week. The dates of our travel will be roughly March 31st to April 15th. They build the whole trip around a consular appointment which will happen on April 12th.

Out itinerary will look roughly like this: leave the US on March 31st for Beijing where we will spend 2-3 days getting adjusted to the time and the place and doing some site seeing. Grayson is especially excited to see the Great Wall of China. I'd imagine we will see the Forbidden City and Tianammen Square as well. The Chinese government feels that people adopting their children should know something about the culture and should be able to say to their adopted children, "I have been to your birth country."

From Beijing we head for Nanchang which is the provincial capital of Jiangxi Province. Our little girl was left on the doorstep of the Yiyang Social Welfare Institute on the day she was born, May 18, 2009. There people will bring the babies to us in either a hotel or a consulate. We have been told by our agency that we will be given the option to travel to the orphanage which is a 2-3 hour drive from where we will stay. Originally we were told no orphanage for fear of N1H1. (They are afraid of it, understandably.) This part of the trip seems to be the murkiest in details.

From there we travel to Guangzhou which is where all families adopting from China end up. We will stay at the famous White Swan Hotel and shop and site see while we wait for all the official papers to come through. Then we arrive home and adjust to our new life and new family.