Harbin - The City of Ray

(Sat Nov 10; 10:45pm-ish PRC)

Hello!

It's Saturday night for us...Saturday morning for you! We are 13 hours ahead of the east coast. I had previously thought 12, but the Chinese don't do Daylight Savings; in fact, apparently THE ENTIRE country is on one time zone.

And speaking of timezones, not only are my father and I in the same timezone as Ray, we are now in the same city, having flown safely into Harbin City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin) last night. "Yesterday was a long two days."

...so we left off with having successfully run the security gauntlet on Thursday in Baltimore. It seemed, though, as if everything had to come out of the bag - the laptop, the DVD player, the video camera. And for that brief 20 seconds, I was not comfortable having my travel pouch thingy off and away from my body. Those who have adopted from China know there is more than a passport in there.

Once through and our shoes back on, we headed down Terminal D at BWI. Two stops were made before we even bothered going to gate D15 where UA641 would take off for Chicago. First was to an electronics store to pick up a USB cable (from videocam to laptop) and then to the fine dining of Quizznos. Hey, they're the only place other than MickeyDees that was serving breakfast sandwiches; and let me say, their "Black Angus, scrambled egg, and cheddar" was almost of good as the wrapper it was in. But the protein gave us nourishment.

My dad and I talked about the pending adoption, and I tried to impart how we've met such amazing families through this journey, many of whom are from church or on our Waiting China Families ListServe. They all humble us. In fact, on Wednesday three families received their Travel Authorizations and will be traveling to China on Thanksgiving, the day after we return, to bring home their children (two Samuels and a Joseph!).

Then I shared with my dad this special family - Sarah and Chris - who are in the process of adopting their little son Jaxson (Ru Cong). Oh how their boy is precious; my dear Rose just fell for him when she saw pictures of him over the summer. Well, not one minute later I get an email over the crackberry from Sarah saying she received a most wonderful gift...an email from a family in China who saw their little boy...and took updated pictures of Jaxson!

Speaking for many families, the wait for your child is very trying, and the most modest of updates can be so uplifting. Well, this was no small update - there were seven pics, AND some video to come. And little Jaxson's dimples weren't small either! (The most recent pic of Ray was sent just two weeks ago, and it meant so much to us.)

After we cleaned up, down to the gate we went. One last good-bye call to Rose was made. She had taken the kids back to my parent's home and was having breakfast with my mom. No doubt Julia, Benjamin, and Elizabeth enjoyed themselves with their grandmother!

The call for boarding came and we moved right along with the crowd. I've been on a hundred planes in my time, and this was first in the line of my next seven to be taken over two weeks that would prove to be the most important in life. Up and out we went to the Windy City.

While underway I realized my journal was missing. What was I going to write on? Well, the barf bag of course, right in the seat pocket in front of me. If there is a more suitable name I've forgotten it; but this did the trick and more so while the mp3 player did its thing.

The two-hour flight went by in what seemed to be just 120 minutes, and we landed in O'Hare, an airport significantly busier than our BWI. At the top of the ramp we asked where the international terminal was; according to the fellow, United's international flights go off with the domestics.

I called Rose to let her know we landed safely, and then we made it to gate 40B where UA851 would be taking off for Beijing at 12:36pm. Even though we had boarding passes, we needed to check in at the gate so the United agents could confirm our Chinese VISA's were okay. Oh, and also they could let us know we could upgrade to business class...for the low, low price of $650 per person. The lady stressed it was one way (and a discount off the normal $12,000), and I stressed no thank you. "You think about it. There is good shrimp." Uh, yeah, good shrimp for rediculous dough, thank you, no.

But my father and I were hungry, so we had an awesome salad at..."It's Just Salad" (his had shrimp actually) and then we did the junior thing, or at least I did. "Well, since they are only serving us lunch on the plane, and the ride is 14 hours, we should buy a sandwich and stuff for the flight." Whatever. There ended up being tons of food on the plane.

Last minute calls were made home, and I got all choked up with Rose because that's what I do. This was it. We boarded the jumbo 747 and plopped in our seats. The flight wasn't full so maybe we'd be able to have an extra seat in our row once we took off; problem was, I was a fool for thinking that. The flight was packed, except for the - how's your short-term memory? - business class.

By far, the 14-hour flight would be the longest I'd ever taken. I've been to Europe several times, but this would easily be twice that in time.

The plane sat for a while due to a "minor mechanical problem with one engine that we can't get started." Now look, I'm all for honesty, but was that degree of full-disclosure necessary? The man could have left it with "we'll be leaving soon," or something like that.

Eventually around 1:20pm the plane moved into position and rumbled down the runway, gradually picking up speed. I've always been fine with taking off, and have never enjoyed the landing part because of the feeling I get when the brakes are applied. Nonetheless, a pilot friend I had from the early 90's would say landing is easy, and getting a gazillon-ton piece of metal up in the air was the hard part. Well, our big piece of metal got up without incident, thank God.

It's weird, the flight doesn't seem long now, but that's because it's a day behind me. I do have a slight "butt-memory" from it. Hey, that's a long time to be sitting, ya know. Really, there was only one definite moment where I thought, "You have got to be kidding!" and that's when we had been on the plane forever and I made the mistake of asking what time it was. It was too hard to get over the reality of seven and half hours of flying remaining. Wow. That's when my dad said, "Now look, don't start with this are we there yet stuff. Imagine in two weeks when Ray is on the plane and he doesn't even understand that there is such a thing as 'there.' Oy vey, let's not and say we did.

There were four movies on this flight, so that helped folks I guess. I know nothing about Harry Potter and tried to watch some version of it, but gave up about ten minutes into it; it's just not my bag, as they say. Later, though, I'd catch the remake of Hairspray and it was pretty darn entertaining. There were some big names in there, with Travolta, Walkens, Phieffer, Queen Latif (do I have that right?), and well-known B players. I also liked that it was all about Baltimore, even if it apparently wasn't filmed in Baltimore (for shame!).

I didn't watch the other two films, but in between the movies they'd flash up on the screen a map of the plane's flight pattern, and some flight stats. As you may be able to see here we went way north; eventually we'd come across and down Asia.

As hinted above, there was plenty of food on the plane. We had lunch (note to self: don't get the beef next time you adopt) which had a pretty good salad, an awesome roll (no really, I'm not just saying that), and a yummy brownie/cake chocolate thing. Later we'd have a sort of fancier version of Oodles of Noodles for a snack; and then towards the end there was another meal, and I chose chicken and noodles. Everybody did actually, cause they ran out and some had to have the lah-zag-nah.

Then all the sudden there was this weird and wonderful announcement: we'd be landing in 39 minutes! That was music to my ears. After thousands of miles (yes, I feel stupid I don't know how long the flight was), a top altitude of 38,000 feet, temperatures of minus 85 degrees F (outside; inside wasn't bad), we were landing!

I quickly filled out all the Customs stuff and did have to declare the cash I had. BUT I didn't have to declare alcohol, cigaretts, cigars, of tobacco because I didn't have anything over 1,500ml, 400 sticks, 100 sticks, or 500g, respectively.

The big bird touched down in Beijing around 3:50pm! It seemed we taxied for a good bit of time, then the captain said someone was in our gate so we needed to wait. Naturally, I looked around, trying to capture whatever I could through the two little windows on our side. There wasn't much to see other than a building with an interesting roof, and, I guess, an air-traffic control tower.

The gate finally cleared, and we slowly inched into it. Like when traveling at home, everyone "got ready and into position" to de-plane. Dad and I didn't rush; and yet, we never thought we'd be the very last passengers off the huge plane, which we were. This occurred partially because I was trying to find a book I thought was lost; more so, however, a Frogger-like phenomenon happened and the flow of people coming up the aisle was constant and unrelenting.

No biggie, but being so behind made it interesting in that there was no "crowd" for us to follow, and we were actually headed in the wrong direction, but a flight attendant straightened us out; we went through the quarantine gate and had our VISA's checked, then we headed to baggage claim. The latter was a wait and a half, with it being five-people deep to the belt going around. Yet the aforementioned "half" part did come and we both got our two bags. Then I hit customs in the "red" declaration line, but I was the only one so there was no line. The good officer simply said "show me, show me" the money and I did, then that was that.

WELCOME TO CHINA!!!

From there you saw how we did a little surfing in the Sunbird Digital Harbor Relaxtion Center. Earlier we had checked out bags and got our boarding passes for the 8:40pm Harbin City flight. This gave us plenty of time to make that flight, something like 2+ hours.

Aside from blogging and calling home, we tried to contact our coordinator who would be meeting us in Harbin. Well we reached May on her cell...and she was actually at the Beijing Airport like us, taking the same flight as us. Great! Well to make a suspenseful story not suspenseful...we nearly missed our flight. We dilly-dallied too long with the Internet, forgot we had to go through security (you can leave your shoes on here!), got on a peoplemover that may as well have been broken, and by the time we got near our gate a woman was yelling "HAR-bean! HAR-bean!"

We gave her the tickets, leaped through the bus doors, and there May was. I shook her hand and surprised her with a hug. I'm a hugger from way-back-when, so get used to it. (She had to be thinking, AND WHERE EXACTLY HAVE YOU BEEN YOU KNUCKLEHEADS! In a nice way, I'm sure.)

The bus left two minutes later and...we were the last people on the plane. Yes, the Ugly Americans barge on while everyone is in their seat; we couldn't find any overhead compartments with space...then we found the space. To boot, we had to ask some poor lady to get out of our assigned seat. Goodness, me. All this to fall asleep within 10 minutes of the 90-minute flight. The guy next to us seemed none too happy.

When we landed around 10:30pm it was 32 degrees F. It really wasn't that cold, though; well, it was, but you know what I mean. We got out bags and then met our driver from the Civil Affairs office. He drove us to our hotel - The Zhengming JinJiang Hotel - in about 30 minutes. Not much of Harbin could be seen during the drive, but clearly it's an industrial town.

The whole Finksburg-door-to-Harbin-door trip took just under 28 hours. But, um, it really didn't feel much over 24 hours...which must have been why I stayed up another four until 3am in the morning. :)

Anyway, here's the reality - we are in the SAME CITY AS RAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And Monday...is Gotcha Day.

Peace and love to all. Again, sorry, but we are blind posting so I can't see any comments; yet please send them for later, for inspiration. For Ray.

Demian