Ni Hao from China!!!!

Ni hao from China,

We are here in Harbin! The winter Ice and snow festival is underway and we are the lone Americans except for our travel pal and adoptive mom partner, Theresa.  It was a long way to get here but our flights from Newark were nice, long of course but totally uneventful.   Don’t know that Iever watched that many movies or tv in my life haha. Watched some good movies from our very nice plane and United did a good job. We had fancy monitors on the back of each seat and could watch whatever we wanted. I did feel sorry for Tom for as high tech as it was none of the movies had captions, unless you wanted Arabic captions… go figure…. Tom played a lot of games on his monitor and apparently won world Championship in poker hahah.    We flew into Beijng without a hitch and then had about 6 hours to sit and wait for our next flight. Only problem was for Tom and I the time in Beijing was about 2 in the morning in America and we had already flewn one day and had not yet slept so staying awake to keep an eye on your luggage was rough. I didn’t make it having had been so sick that I passed on the seats waiting for the plane and slept about 2-3 hours that way while my poor hubby starred at me.  I am still not well, but the air in Beijing was beyond frightening.  It was like being at a huge campout with a million fires burning at the same time. Believe it or not that was the air quality IN the airport. You could not even see outside really it is so thick. VERY SCARY.  Our flight to Harbin was short and uneventful and we met up with our friend Theresa on the plane.  It is nice to be here with someone else and not just Tom and I. 

W e arrived in our hotel at about midnight and tried hard to get internet only to find out that there is not internet to get. Very frustrating. We have no outside communication with anyone at this point and our phones are useless clocks as well. 

Today we ventured outside since it says it is actually like a heatwave here for the ice festival as it was 5 degrees outside and not the normal 50 below. We heard tomorrow might be 12 degrees, SHORTS people shorts hahahh…  It is not good air quality here either and my lungs are not liking it. Very smokey and smells like campfires burning too. I tried to use my nebulizer machine and we darn near set the room on fire (twice) seems my nebulizer must not have survived the flight well and turns into  a smoking burning, flaming machine when plugged in (no it is not the plug the converter is good.) sooo no nebulizer. 

We went out with Theresa today and hit the streets. We were armed with underarmour and layers and did pretty well staying warm. The place is pretty cool with ice sculptures everywhere. We hit several huge under ground malls.  You could buy anything there and tons of it. We hit super Walmart (yup even up here in what seems to be the ends of the earth (pretty sure that it doesn’t get much colder in the world then where we are, it is only above freezing 3 months out of the year here.) We got some drinks and snacks for the room and some yogurt for me as I am having a hard time finding something I want to eat.

We meet our guide, Lynn tomorrow and she will take us to the bank to change over our money and then we will go meet our Emma. I cant believe it is here, the time is really come to meet our kiddos!  I know I cant post this probably until Wednesday when we hit Guangzhou but want to keep track of our journey so I am writing it in MS word and will snag it over to a blog post when we find something that looks like internet!  Ok going to go rest for a bit and chill as tomorrow starts a big day!!!!!

Good night from Harbin!