First day in Zhengzhou

11/28/2010

Hey Adam Here, taking over blog duties for today...

Today we woke up bright and early at 6:30ish in the morning. Got ready and reluctantly put our bags in the hallway to be picked up by the hotel staff and loaded onto our bus. I was assured that this was common practice and that I had better get used to it because we would be doing that for the rest of the trip also. We headed down for breakfast and ate with a couple from the group then loaded up on a bus and headed to the airport with George our guide. At the airport we all got our tickets as a large group and had to hand over our passports in a huge stack to George so that we could get our tickets. Again we were reluctant to hand those over, but I guess this is common practice also. Our group created quite a backlog of people in the line. Next we were off to security screening. They had a fool proof way of sniffing out explosive devices by actually opening up any suspicious liquids (like… Downy wrinkle releaser or hand sanitizer) and smelling the bottles contents two times with two different people. Yeah… we feel really safe now.

We were off to the airplane to head to Zhengzhou. Meg and I got tickets next to each other, but a bunch of the families in our group got split up and the children were put in seats nowhere near their families. After trading seats with some solitary travelers everyone got to be where they needed to be. The flight was an hour and a half and had some movie I had never heard of on the overhead screens. They served these cookies which were a combination of a shortbread cookie & wheat thins. They came in packs of about 8 or so. They were pretty good and were the talk of the flight when we landed. When we were ready to get off the plane, there was not a lot of row by row orderly exiting. I had to stick my bag into the aisle to block the fourth person from passing our row and was still being pushed by the guy who sat next to me in the window seat.

Once off the plane we all collected our bags and were off to find our guides Cindy, Rita and Yisha from CCAI . On the bus they told us all we needed to know about what we would be doing in the next few days. We got lanyards with our child’s name on it so that local people had something official saying that we were not stealing a Chinese child. I took a bunch of pictures on the bus and was surprised at how much smog there is here. Our guide pointed out some spots of interest along the way. We missed Walmart but saw McDonalds and some parks with playgrounds and good hotel food spots. Warning do not eat at the smaller places because they are not checked on a weekly basis for quality and safety.







We got to the Hotel and as a group were already checked in and just had to pick up our room keys. We got to our room and it smelled like smoke. It is a non smoking room but sometimes the Chinese men like to smoke in the rooms anyways (so I was told by our guide). We looked at another room but that one smelled like mildew and was way more powerful than the smoky room so we are staying in that room but opening the windows and got a fan to air it out.






We went to lunch at the Holiday Inn Express. It was pretty fancy for that hotel. Meg and I got french fries and fried chicken. We thought that our server messed up and only thought we wanted one order but about 15 minutes later we got our second order. Too bad I had finished my drink. There was a mix up when I went up and asked for the check because we had to leave. The server came back to the table next to us because there was a gentleman in our group that has my general look. The server was then asking that table to pay even though they had not gotten their meals yet. She was so embarrassed when we tried to clear it up. We paid with our room key and got no receipt. We were told it would show up on our bill at the end of the visit.

Next it was Meg off to the bank to exchange large amounts of cash into RMB to use in the next few days. I unpacked our bags and got the room set up for Jack to come. Really looking forward to meeting him tomorrow. Meg came back and said that we were off to Walmart in 5 minu tes with the group. It was a nice walk but we quickly realized that you have to share the sidewalk with scooters and bikes of all shapes and sizes. The traffic here is crazy. I do not think that pedestrians have the right of way here.









Walmart was cool, but our quest to find Megan Coke Light was unsuccessful and disappointing – even the local restaurants don’t carry it. We bought some snacks and looked at strollers but they were more expensive than we expected. Even the simple ones. We got some Chinese pop music and some Chinese character DVDs. We got back together with our group and walked the long walk back to the hotel in the evening. All the buildings are lit up so nice and our hotel is all decorated for Christmas. It looks so festive. We dropped off our groceries and emptied out the fridge to put our cold stuff in. Then we grabbed some dinner at Mamma Mia’s in our hotel. It was pretty good flat style pizza. We got these cute rolls and sauce dishes before the meal and I had to get a picture. Then it was back to the room to get everything ready for Tomorrow. When we arrived, we were surprised to find that the hotel has a turn-down service. Complete with a mint chocolate.





There is laundry service at the hotel but it is about $4.00 per shirt and it takes 1 day to get it back. Outside the hotel it is cheaper but it takes 3 days to get it back. Meg’s “water in the tub” laundry service is free and only takes as long as it takes to air dry the rung out clothes. While doing the laundry, we found that the filled tub could not be drained and we had to call for tub emptying service. 2 people and a plunger got the job done.

Meg finished packing up the gifts, money, and Jack’s backpack (a Jack-pack!) for tomorrow while I finished up this blog.




I think we are now set to have a Toddler boy join our family tomorrow!