The Hong Kong Tour

Today we toured Hong Kong and although Jeff had a good experience, I had a different one... The morning started off great with breakfast with a couple from the Dallas area. They were very nice and excited about being in Hong Kong too. We boarded a large tour bus at 8:05 a.m. and we were off to see the city. It's funny that I had not given any thought to the geography of Hong Kong. It turns out to be a very mountainous place. The roads are narrow and the climb, sudden stops and turns on a dime caught up to me in just a matter of minutes. I was sick! A nice lady in our group gave me some dramamine at our first stop and thank the lord she did. After about 2 hours or so, I started feeling human again. There was a lot of unexpected traffic here and unfortunately we spent much of our day in it. We were able to travel to the very peak of Hong Kong but because it was raining, we could not see Mainland China... We also went to a jewelry maker and an outside place of worship. We wrapped the day up with a family style lunch called "Dim Sum". The food was great and after 6.5 hours on the bus, it was wonderful sitting down to eat. There are great people that we are traveling with and we talked about meeting our children soon. For dinner Jeff and I went to a restaurant in the hotel where they only provide chop sticks. After some clumsy mistakes, we both caught on and were quite impressive with them. The staff came by often to ask if we wanted forks or help...

At lunch today, I learned some information that I would have been happy to live without. It seems that to "break the bond" between babies and their foster families, about a week before were receive Clara, she was taken back to the orphanage to stay. This info. was heartbreaking to me. The descriptions of the relationship with Clara and her foster family appeared to be sweet and it was evident that she is loved by them. It makes me sad that she has to go through this difficult time but I am happy that we get to meet her tomorrow and begin our own relationship with her. We board a flight to Nanchang around 11:30 a.m. (China time) for an almost 2 hour flight. When we get to the hotel, we will wait to meet Clara. We hear that the babies may very well be there when we arrive so we are packing our backpack with Clara stuff to try to woo her. We have Cheerios, toys, a picture book Liah made her and more food.
We hope to update tomorrow evening but we are unsure of internet access at our hotel. We also need to pick up a USB port so that we can upload pictures because we forgot to bring one from home... so tomorrow there may be now pictures of our meeting. We will write when we can.