Welcome to the chaos of our daily lives as adoptive parents. Today a bunch of stuff happened all at once, while Melissa and I were trying to work.
12:39pm - Mike, our travel coordinator from the adoption agency, writes to tell us our US Consulate date has been set for Wed, Sept 3. He will get back to us about travel arrangements today - be ready!
4:05pm - New word from Mike with our travel itinerary. Look them over, make sure everything looks kosher and make your decision now! Send payment in full to the travel agent by 5pm PST.
4:35pm Melissa calls to tell me that the travel agent doesn't take American Express!!! What kind of travel agency doesn't take AmEx??? We have a Visa Checkcard but not enough money has been moved from our adoption savings account to our checking account to cover the several thousand dollars we need by 8pm tonight. Yikes! Melissa's mom saves the day and foots the whole bill on her Visa! Thanks mom; the check's in the mail. We should have seen that one coming.
Reading back over it now doesn't look so dramatic, but let me tell you it was quite a head spinner today to manage all this info while trying to look like I was doing my job. Really I was just staring at our travel itinerary and counting the layover hours, flight hours, trying to calculate time zone differences, etc.
And this is what I learned....China is all one time zone! Seriously, it's thousands of miles across, at least as wide as the US and it's all one time zone!!! Don't believe me? Go Google it...I'll be here when you get back. It's like they looked at the map that divides up all countries of the world into one hour blocks and said, "Nah". The funny thing is that this doesn't really suprise me all that much. I mean if I had to pick any country in the world that would "opt out" of the whole international timezone thing....it would be China. But seriously, just imagine how late the sun sets in Xinjiang, the westernmost province in China.
And while you're Googling time zones take look at India and Nepal. China (all of China mind you) is exactly 12 hours ahead of us. OK, India is 7.5 hours ahead of us; it is 10pm right now in Norfolk, Virginia and it is 730am in India! Not 7am or 8am, 730. And Nepal is 15 minutes ahead of that. Who has a 15 minute time zone? Nepal does, that's who. So, in Nepal, which is just a tad north of India, it's now 745am! And just to the north of those two countries, it's 10am in China. One step across the Tibet-Nepalese border and you instantly loose 2 hours and 15 minutes of your life. If that doesn't pickle you brain just a bit..well then you must have had better luck concentrating at work than I did today.
But I digress....
So, we have our official travel dates now: leaving Aug 21, returning Sept 5. We are flying Northwest the whole way - Norfolk to Detroit to Tokyo to Beijing. Over 24 hours of continuous travel, 4 flights, 17 hours of flight time (if all goes well). And that's just to get there! Never mind the 2 domestic flights we will have in country, one with a brand new son who speaks only Mandarin. Then we do it all over again on the way back: Guangzhou, Tokyo, Detroit, Norfolk. We loose a day flying over the international date line on the way there and get it back coming home. So we will leave China 8am on Sept 5th, fly for 24 straight hours and arrive home at 7pm the same day! Mind boggling. And I'm sure our bodies will be boggled too.
So now I'm doing some freaking out of my own. This is so close I can hardly focus on anything else. I keep staring at the pink rocking horse picture, trying to fathom what a year's worth of aging will have done to him. Will we even recognize our precious Tyson when we see him? Will the orphanage ever send us an update so we will know his size and weight and shoe size? Or will we be left to guess and have to bring the baggy Diego briefs in hopes we can shrink them in a Chinese laundry?
All these questions and more will be answered in due time I suppose. Until then I'll be contemplating time zones in Asia...
Can't wait to meet you little dude!
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