From years, to months, to weeks, to days...

To hours...

As I sit here in our hotel room in my son's province in Southern China, it is merely 44 hours and 45 minutes until we meet Oliver....wow....

It is merely HOURS until we have our son in our arms, and the 7+ year wait to kiss and cuddle and smooch our child is over...as is Oliver's 8 1/2 month wait for his forever family. 3pm on Monday afternoon is when it's all going to happen....wow.

Unfreakingbelievable!!!

Our trip from Hong Kong was great - we shared the journey with 3 other couples who are in our "batch"of 6 couples. There was a lot of nervous tension in the air on that plane!

Our hotel in Nanchang is called the "Galactic Peace"...ambitious (no, let's not just go for world peace, let's shoot for the stars people...Galactic Peace!!). We have a suite which is great as we have a little extra room for the moo-ster to hang out with us in. When the housekeeper wheeled in a little white cot yesterday afternoon and placed it in our bedroom we got really choked up...

Last night we all met for an early dinner, checked out the local brew and the "Great Wall" red wine (not bad...but to be honest I would have drunk firewater last night!). We all had a relatively early night, and a relatively uncomfortable night's sleep on the rock hard beds (why oh why does every bed in Asia need to feel like a concrete slab?).

Today we headed out with a local shop owner called Tiffanie, who owns "Lucky Tiffanie's", a shop stocking all sorts of souvenir-type stuff. Tiffanie is associated with a small school about 50km out of Nanchang, where local children come to learn English, calligraphy, and music. The taxi ride to and from the town was terrifying.

As most of you know, P and I have done some pretty extreme travel over the last decade and a bit....from undertaking a torrential glacial river crossing in Patagonia and finding that a couple had slipped during the crossing and been killed there just 3 days before, to being abandoned by our guide and left with no food in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and surviving on eating pirhanas for 2 days (sorry mum - had I told you that already or did I choose to keep that quiet?), to nearly going off the side of a cliff in a bus doing hairpin turns in the dark with no headlights in Peru, to crazy taxi drivers in Bangkok, Rio de Janiero, Beijing and Zanzibar....but never, ever have I felt so afraid as I did in this taxi today. He was crazy. We clocked 140 miles per hour (P says for the record it was only 120 miles per hour....whatever, but it was bloody fast) on the wrong side of the road, going UP the offramp for the freeway, with other cars coming straight at us. I have never been so convinced I was going to die, and actually made P promise to fight for the right to still adopt Oliver on Monday if I was killed and he survived. It really was that scary.

I'm shuddering just thinking about it!!

Anyway, back to the nice stuff....

Once we made it to the small town (my legs literally gave way as we stepped out of the taxi) our group of 4 couples were the star attraction for the children who attended the local English school. They have not had foreigners visit them before, and I suspect we were the first non-Chinese people they had seen in the flesh. The children were shy to start with, but slowly practiced their English with us, and posed for photographs (they just loved seeing themselves in the playback of the digital cameras!). They were so lovely. Their music teacher gave us a beautiful demonstration of the zither, and then we all had a chance to have a quick lesson with him. The calligraphy teacher then taught us ""calligraphy 101" and we practiced writing our own names which was fantastic.

We headed back to Nanchang after about 2 hours at the school (different taxi driver, still crazy...offered to pay him double if he went slower....he didn't) and hit Walmart (or perhaps mor correctly., Walmart hit us...hard!). How to describe Walmart...um, overwhelming. Fantastic, but pretty noisy, smelly (they have great piles of dried fish on display and a million other things in the meat department that will fuel my nightmares for many weeks to come!), crowded and bustling! I tried to take a sneaky video just to try and capture the sheer chaotic-ness (is that a word?) of the whole place.

Relaxing it ain't!

So that brings us to now....we have changed hotel rooms (first one was on a smoking floor and stunk to high heaven so we changed to nonsmoking this arvo...a pain, but worth it) and are now sitting and doing nothing. We are pretty worn out after today's adventures. We have a bottle of "Great Wall" and intend on doing nothing more than drinking it, ordering room service, and counting down the hours until we kiss our baby.

44 hours to go....

T xxx