We went for a walk to West Lake on Saturday evening and it was really beautiful, but we didn't want to stay out for too long because we needed to get TongJie and Ezekiel to bed to prepare for a long day of traveling home.
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| Lots of people at West Lake |
Sunday morning, we checked out of our hotel and went with Sarah to the Hangzhou airport. After getting our boarding passes and going through security, we said goodbye to Sarah. She was flying home to Guangzhou and we were flying to Beijing before flying to Seattle. I mentioned before that this was our third time having Sarah as our guide - she was with us when we got TongJie in 2012 in Hangzhou and she went with us to Guangzhou on that trip; in 2015 when we adopted Ezekiel in Jinan we were with Cindy, but Sarah met us when we flew to Guangzhou and was with us for the remainder of our time in China. We feel like she has really gotten to know our family and it's pretty neat that we've gotten to be with her all three times that we've traveled to China. She's a really good guide and hopefully we'll get to see her again when we go back when the boys are older. We said goodbye and gave her a gift, and she gave us a gift of two books, one of well-known Chinese poems (in Chinese and English) with beautiful artwork, and one that tells about Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year.
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| Jeff reading one of the books that Sarah gave us while waiting at the Hangzhou airport |
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TongJie and Ezekiel playing with their new trains while waiting at the Hangzhou airport
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| At the Beijing Airport |
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| Waiting in line to get on the plane - TongJie's stuffed panda from the orphanage was peeking out of his backpack! |
We flew to Beijing (about 2 hours) and then got ready for our long flight to Seatac. The flight to Seattle was delayed by almost an hour. We left Beijing around 5:00 pm on Sunday and arrived in Seattle around noon on Sunday. My parents picked us up at the airport and drove us home. We got to our house in the late afternoon and it was so good to be home! Jeff and I barely made it to 8:00 before putting the boys to bed and immediately going to bed ourselves. I woke up around 10:00 to the sound of TongJie and Ezekiel laughing and playing in their room, with the light on. They had both slept for a few hours on the airplane and apparently had gotten their "second wind." When I went in to talk to them, they said "but it's the middle of the day in China and our bodies are used to being in China so we're not tired!" Nevertheless, I was mean and made them turn their light off and lay down and try to sleep. Eventually they fell asleep and slept until around 11:00 this morning. We were all pretty tired today but worked on unpacking, laundry, etc. and Ezekiel and I went to Walmart and got new glasses frames for him. Nobody took naps today so hopefully the boys will go to sleep a little earlier and we'll start getting our schedule back on track after a few days. It seems like kids usually have an easier time adjusting from jet lag, so it will probably be me and Jeff suffering the longest. I'm still working on putting the pictures from our trip onto the computer - we took a lot of pictures! This was such a fun trip and I'm so glad we got the opportunity to do it this summer! I'm also VERY glad that we did the trip at the beginning of the summer so we have more time to recover before going back to school.
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