Flight Information and a Warning!

We've had several of our friends ask for our flight information, so I'm posting it below.

But first, for anyone considering taking advantage of our being away from home...  
BE WARNED!  We have two overly protective dogs, a cat with a history of injuring full-grown adults, a whole-house alarm system, a watchful former Marine next-door neighbor, and a house-sitter with a very low tolerance for B.S..  At least two of the aforementioned will be armed!  Think again and live to tell about it, Bub.

Thursday 10 February 2011			Air
Continental Airlines Inc - Flight CO 7655		Status:	Confirmed
OPERATED BY /UNITED EXPRESS/TRANS STATES AIRLINES
Depart:	Washington Dulles Int'l Airport	Airline Ref:	AS2CZP
	Washington, DC, US	Seat:	08A 08B 08C
	8:17 AM	Class:	H-Economy/Coach
		Mileage:	215
Arrive:	Newark Int'l Airport	Travel Time:	1:13
	Newark, NJ, US	Stopovers:	0
	9:30 AM	Aircraft:	ER4
	Terminal A	Meal:

Thursday 10 February 2011			Air
Continental Airlines Inc - Flight CO 0089		Status:	Confirmed
Depart:	Newark Int'l Airport	Airline Ref:	AS2CZP
	Newark, NJ, US	Seat:	43D 43E 43F
	11:50 AM	Class:	H-Economy/Coach
	Terminal C	Mileage:	6817
Arrive:	Beijing Capital Airport	Travel Time:	13:45
	Beijing, CN	Stopovers:	0
	Friday, February 11, 2011
	2:35 PM	Aircraft:	Boeing 777-200/300
	Terminal 3	Meal:	Lunch

Friday 25 February 2011			Air
Continental Airlines Inc - Flight CO 0098		Status:	Confirmed
Depart:	Hong Kong Int'l Airport	Airline Ref:	AS2CZP
	Hong Kong, CN	Seat:	20D 20E 20F
	11:25 AM	Class:	H-Economy/Coach
	Terminal 1	Mileage:	8055
Arrive:	Newark Int'l Airport	Travel Time:	15:20
	Newark, NJ, US	Stopovers:	0
	1:45 PM	Aircraft:	Boeing 777-200/300
	Terminal B	Meal:	Lunch

Friday 25 February 2011			Air
Continental Airlines Inc - Flight CO 3262		Status:	Confirmed
OPERATED BY /COLGAN AIR DBA CONTINENTAL CONNECTION
Depart:	Newark Int'l Airport	Airline Ref:	AS2CZP
	Newark, NJ, US	Seat:	06A 06B 06C
	3:25 PM	Class:	H-Economy/Coach
	Terminal C	Mileage:	215
Arrive:	Washington Dulles Int'l Airport	Travel Time:	1:30
	Washington, DC, US	Stopovers:	0
	4:55 PM	Aircraft:	BOMBARDIER Q400 TURBOPROP-2 ENGINES
		Meal:

Cultural Education (or "I'd have rather had a moon PIE")

We are now five days and a few hours away from our scheduled flight time!  (Keep checking the Countdown Timer tab!) The excitement (a.k.a. "Stress") keeps building by the minute. We've double-checked our paperwork for our trip and we've started packing suitcases. We've set aside our original orphanage donations for a local christian charity that helps homeless and needy families in our area.

An interesting story of cultural education:

With the Lunar or "Chinese" New Year, we decided to do a little celebrating with BSP's godparents & their children. We went to an authentic Chinese restaurant in east Fairfax that has long been a favorite of ours. As always, the dinner was phenomenal and the service was wonderful. Once we were done with dinner and had paid the check, the waitress brought out an unexpected and unidentified gift for us. The gift was an odd, heavy, round, brown, pie-like object with five red fruit or beans on top and a leaf wrapper underneath. It was roughly eight inches in diameter and more than an inch thick.

One half of the object

After asking our waitress, she informed us that it was a "moon cake" and we thanked her for the gift. We'd never had a moon cake before, so we thanked the waitress and took our gift home without trying it (we'd eaten too much dinner by then).  We split the cake in half (a very difficult cut) and gave one half to our friends.  The following evening after dinner, I decided that I was in the mood for something sweet and that I would try a piece of the moon cake.  I sliced off a small wedge and eagerly took a healthy bite.  To my great dismay, the moon cake, not only had bizarre visual and tactile characteristics, it also had the consistency of wax and the taste of vinyl.  This was quite possibly the single blandest thing I had ever eaten.  I am certain that I could make a mixture of bleached flour and distilled water that would yield more flavor than this moon cake.  After disposing of our half of the offending object, we warned our friends about the moon cake.  We were too late.  They had also tried it and found it to be lacking in every aesthetic measure.  I have since determined the following possible explanations for this object's existence:

1. The Chinese are really bad at desserts, and this was really bad by Chinese standards.
2. This was a decoration, made in fact from synthetic materials and was not meant for consumption.
3. This was the Chinese equivalent of the immortal fruitcake and was meant to be eternally re-gifted.
4. This was a practical joke that went too far - and the wait staff are still laughing at us.

In other news, we have selected our Secret Mystery Guest Blogger (SMGB) and they are now officially on staff.  To those of you who submitted applications, essays, and videos, but were not selected, we deeply thank all 1700+ of you for your interest in the position.  Despite the many qualified and talented applicants, there can be only one.

More on-the-fly Blogging (or "Moron, the Fly, Blogging")

Here I am, blogging again from the parking lot outside of Lucy’s ballet lesson today. We’re down to less than 12 days to go and the time is slipping through our fingers like a cliché.

On the positive side, we have all of our paperwork assembled and organized. I need to make a few dozen copies of documents, but we have all of the pieces we need. We also finished our “money laundering”* ahead of time.

(*For all the government officials reading this, I am only JOKING and referring to exchanging legal tender for better quality bills of the same value to pay for official adoption fees in China. Don’t be a weed.)

On the still-left-to-do list, we have to actually pack for the trip, clean the house for our house sitter, buy some small gifts for the orphanage workers, and a few other miscellaneous tasks.

One negative that we’ve run into is the luggage weight limitation for in-country (China) flights. For our flights between Newark – Beijing (and Hong Kong – Newark) we’re permitted more than 140 lbs per passenger without any baggage fees. For our flights from Beijing – Nanchang – Guangzhou, we are strictly limited to 44 lbs per passenger before incurring a “per kilogram overage fee” of about $3/kg. This means that we are not going to be able to take the donations of clothing, blankets, toys, and stuffed animals we’ve collected to the orphanage without having to pay >$300 in fees. While it really stinks that we can’t deliver our donations to the children, I’d much rather give the $300+ to the orphanage than to some random government worker at the airport. So while cash is extremely impersonal, it’s about the only thing we can give. We’ll give our donations to a local charity instead. Thanks, China Airlines.

We have been told that both Facebook and Blogger/Blogspot (i.e., this blog) are currently blocked in China. So we’ll move on to Plan B to send blog updates via email, and/or Plan C to have a mystery blogger post for us. Supposedly Skype will work from China, so we’ll be chatting that way whenever possible. Also, we’re encouraging Lucy to keep a journal of her journey. We’ll post those to our blog as we’re able.

Detailed Travel Itinerary (or "Where in the World is Lucy Boo?")

We received our detailed in-country travel itinerary yesterday from our adoption agency.  I've put the information into the table below:

DATES	FEB. 10, 2011 – FEB. 25, 2011
LOCATION	BEIJING
THU, FEB. 10	Depart for Beijing
FRI, FEB. 11	Arrive in Beijing
SAT, FEB. 12	Beijing Sightseeing: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace
SUN, FEB. 13	Beijing Sightseeing: Church Service, Great Wall
LOCATION	NANCHANG, JIANGXI
MON, FEB. 14	GOTCHA DAY! A.M. – Flight to Jiangxi P.M. – Meet Your Child & Civil Affairs Appointment
TUE, FEB. 15	Adoption Paperwork / Sightseeing & Shopping
WED, FEB. 16	Adoption Paperwork / Sightseeing & Shopping
THU, FEB. 17	Adoption Paperwork / Sightseeing & Shopping
FRI, FEB. 18	Flight to Guangzhou for Consulate appointment & paperwork
LOCATION	GUANGZHOU
SAT, FEB. 19	Child’s Medical Exam
SUN, FEB. 20	Sightseeing & Shopping
MON, FEB. 21	Consulate Paperwork / Sightseeing & Shopping
TUE, FEB. 22	Consulate Appointment at 9:00 am Consulate Oath-Taking Ceremony
WED, FEB. 23	Free Day in Guangzhou
THU, FEB. 24	Pick-up Child’s visa Depart from Guangzhou (Bus)
LOCATION	HONG KONG
FRI, FEB. 25	Depart from Hong Kong

So it is now official (without any major calamities), Valentine's Day will be BSP's Gotcha Day!  We're psyched that we're getting the most awesome Valentine ever!
And we're down to (just over) 14 days to go!

BSP, The Home Game (or Sorry You Can't Make The Shower)

Ok, so first a disclaimer:

Mel and I had nothing (read "NOTHING") to do with the planning and/or execution of Melanie's BSP baby shower beyond this activity.  If you weren't invited or you were given bad directions intentionally, I can't help ya.  Sorry.  The chicks didn't even invite me to this one and I was the life of the party for Lucy's baby shower.  Yeesh.  Anyway...

Here's the activity, if you'd like to participate:

Activity Photo

1. Click on the photo above and print it out in a 5x7 size. (We're using cover stock heavy paper, but you can print it on whatever paper you choose.)  
2. Write in the "thought bubble" something witty, clever, or sarcastic that you think Penny might be thinking.  
3. On the back, please write a note to Penny; just make it something positive.  
4. Mail it back to us.  If you need our address, let me know and I'll email you.

We will save these and give them to her later in her life (exact date TBD).  We still have Lucy's notes in our safe and we love to read them from time to time.

Thank you in advance for playing along from home!

Three Weeks Away (or "You hear that Mr. Anderson?")

As the Countdown Timer reminds me of our approaching travel date, I hear the Sound of Inevitability.  No, it's not Death, but it certainly is coming at us like a train.  We've gotten a lot accomplished here at the house, but there always seems to be more to do.  Our next big adventures include:

• to start actually packing what we've been staging
• updating the packing list so we know what we're missing
• finding all of our adoption and travel documents
• preparing our house for our house sitter to stay over
• making sure we stay healthy before we travel

So there's not really much left to do after all of that. Yeah...

A friend of the family warned us that we might not be able to access Blogspot.com from China.  If that is the case, Plan B is to update this blog via email.  I can't put in all the crazy links and such right away, but at least we can get info and photos out to the world.  Plan C is to have a secret mystery guest blogger here in the States post for us.  We'll just have to see what China allows us to do on the Internets.

Our adoption agency just set up an official Yahoo Group for our Travel Group so that we can all start to mingle virtually.  And Mel and I have been the only ones to post anything so far.  Echo, echo, echo...  Hopefully the rest of the group will join in soon.

Our official Travel Group meeting and conference call is scheduled for next Thursday.  This is where most of the first-timers will have some sort of "Oh carp!" moment and realize they've forgotten something and they have less than two weeks to take care of it.  We had fun last time around ourselves.  Hopefully, we're carp-proof this time around.

Blogging on the Fly*

(* No flies were hurt in the making of this blog post.)

I’m in the parking lot outside of Lucy’s ballet class with my laptop on my lap – hence the “on the fly” title.  Last night, while Lucy was at gymnastics, Mel and I had a “date night”.  We ate a quick dinner at Flippin’ Pizza, grabbed a frozen custard cake for the weekend celebrations, and came home to continue “The Great Purge”.  And despite the name, we’re doing more organizing than anything really.  BSP’s nursery is largely an established beachhead at this point.  Her furniture is in place, books are in the bookcase, clothes are in the drawers and closet, diaper changing accoutrements are staged appropriately…

Most of the mess that was our basement has been reorganized and put back in a better “stack”.  Hopefully we’ll be able to locate and access clothing, decorations, toys, etc. as the appropriate time approaches now.  We’ve also culled a lot of toys, clothing, and general swag from Lucy’s stashes to identify and stage things that will be BSP-future items, China orphanage donation items, and general charity donation items.  I don’t pretend to understand the algorithms used to differentiate these classifications; I just smile, nod, and tote the bails.

When Lucy came home from gymnastics last night, we had a brief chat in which Mel and I explained to her that we have family friends coming over today to watch the playoff games. These friends include Lucy’s official BFF and her older sister (also an F.O.L., “Friend of Lucy”).  As a condition for having these fine folk visit our home, it was a stated imperative that we get the basement clean and organized.  This message was obviously understood and taken to heart, because at 7:15AM today, Lucy came into our room to tell us that we needed to get cleaning the basement!  How many times do parents hear that from their seven year old daughters?

We spent most of the morning moving, sorting, and organizing.  Now Lucy’s at her ballet lesson.  Afterwards, we’ll have a little lunch, Lucy and I will get back to the salt mine, and Mel will prep food for our afternoon guests.  With any luck, we’ll actually make some progress around the house this weekend and get another step closer to being BSP-ready.

Also established last night, we’ve set up (and successfully tested) a Skype account for video chats from our trip to China.  Hopefully we’ll be able to keep in touch with our friends through that as well as the blog postings, email, and facebook.  Ultimately, we won’t know what connectivity we’ll have until we’re in China, but we’re going to give it our best shot.