Greetings from Tiayuan, Shanxi, China! Our flight from Beijing was only about an hour, but it departed about two hours late. No worries. I just played more Plants vs Zombies.

We’re settling into our room, and preparing baby stuff. Extra change of clothes, a few diapers, etc. It seems all the lights and plugs are controlled by a Byzantine combination of various switches, but we at least got some water boiling.

Tomorrow, we meet our son, but today we met Bill, our guide from here on out. Bill works for our agency and comes with quite a reputation. He is a seasoned veteran of Chinese adoption. We really enjoyed our time with our Beijing guide, Chen, who left us with a gift for Alexander: a set of chop sticks emblazoned with a dragon, since Alexander was born in the year of the dragon. Now we’re looking forward to getting to know Bill.

We have a large room, but it seems much smaller, since there is also a crib in here. Seeing that as we walked in was striking. Oh yes, this is happening.

Here are a few random photos we took today.

The lobby of our hotel in Beijing

Ready for our ride back to the airport

Our flight was delayed, but our spirits stayed high.