Guangzhou!

Today, after a two hour train ride, we arrived in Guangzhou. Aili’s orphanage is in Gaozhou, which is about a four hour car ride from here. This is Guangdong province. The civil affairs office for Guangdong is here in Guangzhou, so all adoptions from orphanages in Guangdong happen here.

When we arrived at the train station, after we got through customs, we met Michael. He’s our agency’s in-country rep who will be our guide/driver/interpreter/savior while we’re here. He was waiting for us. He is awesome and so kind. He gave us a lot of information on the ride to the hotel. The main thing being that we will be meeting Aili at about 3pm tomorrow! I originally thought it would be in the morning, but being that they have to drive four hours to get here, it will be in the afternoon.

After he dropped us off at the W Hotel. Yes, the W! Thanks to my BFF, Vivian, we are staying at the nicest hotel in the city. I mean it is fancy shmancy! We almost feel like impostors. Then we realized, hell no! We totally deserve this! I’ll post pics later. In fact, I’ll have to give the W it’s own post. The best thing for us will be the indoor pool, I think. I guess that depends on if Aili likes the water. But it will certainly keep Raleigh busy. We were going to go around 5:30 this evening. We got our suits on and everything. Then I turned around and Raleigh was asleep in her suit on the bed. I honestly didn’t want to go anyway. My belly is not feeling too great. Doing our damnedest not to drink the water. Not easy to avoid getting any in your mouth. They wash the fruit and veggies with it and we’re eating that. It’s basically impossible.

Enough about my tummy troubles. After we checked in and checked out our fancy schmancy room, we went out on the streets to look for some grub, and buy lots of bottled water of course. Guangzhou is much different than Hong Kong. Most of the people we encountered there could speak English. Not here so much. All I could think about while we were struggling to communicate is how Aili is going to feel being so terrified about the whole situation plus not being able to understand us or us her. My empathy runs deep for that child.

Guess I better hit the hay. Tomorrow will be life changing so I guess I should be well rested for it. Yah, like I’m actually going to be able to sleep. Ha! But I’ll give it a shot. Good night. Tomorrow’s post will be from a family of four.