Free Internet in Beijing!

Hello,

We are all settled into the Poly Plaza Hotel in Beijing and we’ve been to The Summer Palace already. Our room here is so much larger than the one in Nanjing and the hotel has several good restaurants. Yeah.

You’ll never believe what happened on our trip here. We lived it and can’t believe it ourselves. We have been SO INCREDIBLY UNLUCKY travelling on this trip. Colette, you may not want to read the rest…..

The morning we were due to leave Nanjing, we woke up to the largest snowstorm they had seen in 25 years. Very wet, very slippery conditions. The van that is supposed to take us to the airport is slowly making his way to the hotel, but will never make it in time for our flights. The guide can’t reach the airport to see if flights are getting out nor can she reach the agency to get them to help us. As we hang out in the lobby, the guide books three taxis that are willing to get us to the airport. Oh yeah, all the highways are closed so we’ll have to take secondary roads. Almost two hours after we left our rooms, as our luggage is being loaded into the cabs, the van shows up. We cheer and get on board. The trip from the hotel to the airport should take just under an hour. 5 hours later we arrive at Nanjing airport. There is nothing flying in or out. The guide had cancelled our 12:00 flight and booked us on one for 5:00pm (we’ve been up since 6:00am). We arrive at the airport around 3:00pm which is great timing for a 5:00 flight. Of course it doesn’t leave, but flight are starting to get out. At 4:30 we check our luggage in for an 8:00 pm flight. We’ve now been ‘travelling’ for over 12 hours. Jean-Pierre has been pacing the airport with Jie-Jie the entire time we’ve been there because, well, he’s a busy little guy. Around 9:00 pm we board our flight, wait, wait, wait and then finally take off at 9:30. Jie-Jie is so overtired that he is screaming his head off on the plane (luckily no one was sitting beside Jean-Pierre) and the stewardesses are losing their minds trying to come up with ways to ‘help’ Jean-Pierre calm the baby (they just needed to leave him alone, but that’s very hard for Chinese people to do when a baby is in distress). The flight takes off and Jie-Jie falls instantly asleep. Eva is not far behind and we have a lovely flight. We got to our hotel around midnight. Checked in without a hitch and tumbled into bed. I have to say that our guide was EXCELLENT during this whole adventure. She was on the phone most of the day doing everything she could to get us to Beijing. We were lucky to have her.

Today we visited the Summer Palace, had lunch and then went to a silk factory so the kiddies missed their naps again today. Jie-Jie actually fell asleep in Jean-Pierre’s arms during lunch. Eva fell asleep every time we got into the van. Poor little babies. Tomorrow we go to a clinic for Jie-Jie’s medical. It’s part of the process to immigrate him into Canada. It’s actually really a joke since he’s been tested up the wazo in order to be adopted. Anyway, our appointment is at 11:00 and we hope to be out by 12:30. Jie-Jie’s appointment should only take a half hour, but we then have to wait for the other two kiddies travelling with us to get done.