Long flight and Hong Kong

Hi everybody!  This is Crystal posting today.  I realized that, in our first post, we failed to mention our reason for traveling to China.  As most of you probably already know, we're traveling to China to adopt our son.  We will get custody of TongJie on Monday, May 7 in Hangzhou, which is the capital city of the Zheijang province.  Right now, TongJie is in an orphanage in Wenzhou, which is a different city in the Zheijang province.  And right now, WE are in Hong Kong!  We made it through the approximately 14-hour flight from Vancouver, BC to Hong Kong.  Neither of us have ever been on an airplane that big before, nor have we ever been on a flight that long!  We navigated through immigration and customs once in Hong Kong and managed to figure out where to catch a shuttle to our hotel - it went pretty smoothly, actually, but we're really looking forward to tomorrow when we will have a guide in Beijing to show us around.

Another interesting thing is this: while on the flight from Seatac to Vancouver we were sitting a couple rows behind a family with 3 young children.  We were paying close attention to how their youngest daughter did on the flight, because we're a little nervous about taking our little guy on the LONG flight home in a couple weeks.  Anyway, their little girl did great on the flight, and we noticed that the family looked like they were also going to be on our next flight, so we went over and talked to them during the layover.  It turns out that they are from Wenatchee (!) and they know a lot of the same people that we know, and they are also on their way to mainland China via Hong Kong.  They are going to mainland China to do a mission of sorts and will be there for about the same amount of time as us.  We probably won't see them 'til we get back to Wenatchee though, because we'll be in different cities than them, but it was quite funny that another family from Wenatchee was on two of the same flights as us today, AND that we share a lot of the same friends.

"Ron" (our pear traveling buddy - see yesterday's post for an explanation) has been safely traveling in my carry-on bag.  He hasn't lost either of his googly eyes yet, so we're taking that as a good sign.  I am posting some pictures to leave you with.  Nothing too exciting yet.

 1. Jeff this morning (yesterday morning, actually) prePEARing to leave

  2. Our dog, Albert, looking out the window on the drive to Seatac.  My parents were so nice to give us a ride to the airport!  And they're taking care of Albert for us while we're gone.

 3. Ron traveling in my bag . . . he's been a pretty good traveler so far.

4. The view out our hotel window here in Hong Kong.

5. Ron overlooking the lights of Hong Kong out our hotel window.

Well, it's about 10:15 pm, but it's 7:15 am where you guys are, so we're tired!  Tomorrow we fly to Beijing for a couple days of sightseeing before we get TongJie on Monday.