Most of Sunday was spent making the hour-and-a-half plane trip from Hong Kong to Changsha. The morning was getting ready, the afternoon was spent in the airport and on the plane, and then the evening was getting settled into Changsha.

While it may not seem like a long distance to travel, but when you’re traveling with 11 families and everyone has international travel paperwork to complete, and you have bus rides to and from airports, customs, immigration and everything, it can take you most of the day. Just to get everybody together and onto the bus can take an hour.

As we took a last walk around Hong Kong, we saw a Chinese wedding procession, complete with a dozen or so dancers, drums, gongs and all. The bride was in a veiled red dress, and the dancers chanted and lead the way as the wedding car left the hotel. I don’t know all of the significance and symbolism, but it certainly did draw attention to how important the day was!

After getting our travel paperwork in order, we were off to the airport to make the trip from Hong Kong to Changsha. We’ve lost a suitcase wheel coming in to Hong Kong, but otherwise our travel so far has been pretty uneventful – which is a very good thing! Our Chinese hosts have been very nice every step of the way, but it’s a big change from Hong Kong (big city) to Changsha (about 1/2 the size). It was also a big change in climate, from Hong Kong’s warm winter – our guide said that they have never had a white Christmas – to the near freezing cold and rain in Changsha. It’s a good thing we brought our winter coats!

Changsha has a history dating back over 3,000 years and is the capital of Hunan province. The province is also famous as the birthplace of Chairman Mao. Our local CCAI guides here said that Hunan babies have a reputation as being “spicy” and people from Hunan are known as brave, honest, smart, upstanding and hardworking.

Once we got to our home for the week (click here for more on the Dolton Hotel) we got an update from the orphanage on Sarah. It turns out that she’s a roommate with 4 other babies in our group of families. We are becoming close with the others in our group, but this is just one more tie to this group we’re coming to know as an extended family. She’s not potty trained (good thing we brought a lot of diapers) but she loves to play with dolls. She’s not too good with strangers, but she can call out “ba-ba” (father) and “ma-ma” (you can guess that one) so hopefully she won’t think we’re strangers for too long.

CCAI has been top notch all the way – even to providing bottled water, formula and rice cereal to help us take care of Sarah. They have volunteered to babysit or change diapers or whatever they can do to help our family. Our hotel has been great too … they got us a crib and a baby bath tub for free.

Just a few more hours until we get to meet Sarah! We keep learning more about her and her birthplace – we just can’t wait to hold her in our arms!