~Lydia
What a day! We left for the airport early this morning to fly to Chongqing only to find out it was delayed. No reason given, no estimated time given, so we just sat at the Beijing airport hoping it wouldn't get canceled. So, 2 1/2 hours after our original departure time, I was walking out of the restroom only to hear a bazillion teenaged girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Then I saw this mob of teen girls following this teen boy and his bodyguard down the hall toward our gate. It turns out that one of the members of this very famous boy band in China, TF Boys, was flying to Chongqing on our flight. Of course, we had NO idea who this was. It was only after we met our guide that she showed us another mob of girls surrounding his car and the police trying to control the scene that she said who it was. We all had to laugh that the closest we have ever gotten to a famous person in the US was when I passed Dolly Parton in the Nashville airport and certainly no mob of girls was chasing her screaming, but we come to China and are on a flight with basically one of the members of Chinese One Direction! After all that, we had a fairly uneventful flight to Chongqing. No one bothered this poor kid on the flight. We learned that you can't use cell phones on airplane mode on a China Southern flight. We also learned that "no smoking" is just a suggestion and that the rather strong smell of smoke coming from the bathroom as a line of 10 guys rotated in and out of there is just ignored. We learned that "keep your cell phones off until we are at the gate" and "keep your seat belts fastened until we are at the gate" is also just a suggestion because the second the wheels touched the ground people started making and taking phone calls and texts and their seat belts unclicked in unison. We had a 2 hour and 15 minute flight and they served us a full meal. Our options were fish and rice or mushroom noodles. Both options came with peas, carrots and pickles medley, a roll, and banana yogurt. Interesting. Not quite delicious but a lot more interesting than pretzels!
We are in Chongqing now at the hotel. This place is just as gorgeous as I remembered it. The high end shops surrounding the city center are just beautiful...Prada, Tiffany & Co., Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc. The traffic is easier, though still not easy...there are 33 million people in Chongqing. We tried Pizza Hut again. This time between Google translate (which I can't explain how we were able to download that since Google is apparently blocked by the government along with Facebook and Instagram) and a helpful waitress, we were able to convey that we wanted tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese and not brown stinky sauce and cheese. We were beyond thrilled that we got what we wanted and took a picture of the pizza and the check to show the next waitress in case we go back.
Tomorrow we take a 5 1/2 hour train ride to XiuShan after visiting the Civil Affairs Office here in Chongqing. At the Civil Affairs Office we will get to review Lydia's adoption file and hopefully glean more insight into her 8 1/2 months before we adopted her. In XiuShan, we don't know what we will see and who we will get to talk to exactly, but we will see the spot where she was found and subsequently was turned over to the orphanage. Five and a half hours on a train sounds exhausting after our long travel day today and we've never been to XiuShan so we are a bit nervous. Everything else, so far, has felt familiar to us.
Wifi is hard to come by for us, so I don't know what our XiuShan wifi situation will be like. Hopefully we will get access and can update the next couple of days. If not, we will as soon as we can. Goodnight!
~Carla
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