Our trip started out the night before Thanksgiving. We had not even started packing yet, so that started after we had family dinner for Whizzy's birthday. That was lots of fun! Carrie was the hit of the dinner with the rest of the patrons at Old House Smokehouse, we had yummy birthday cake, then got home around 8:30 or so. I was of course dreading putting her to sleep. Whizzy et al gave Carrie-boo her bath while Jerry and I attempted to start packing. Once they were done they gave us a call and we headed over. Before we even got into the room I was crying :) I'm sure Carrie thought I was a weirdo, but whatever. We read The Hungry Caterpillar & Where the Wild Things Are, then we snuggled for a few minutes and we put her down. Ugh. She was fine, I was not.
So then we went back over to the cottage to pack. The entire process took about 3 hours. Why, I'll never know. It's just two weeks, but you would have thought it was two years. We weren't ready for bed until about midnight. Jerry of course immediately fell asleep, but once it was all quiet, that's when I started thinking about Carrie again...so off to the couch I went to watch a couple of episodes of Top Chef I had DVR'd. I think I fell asleep around 2, and the alarm clock went off at 3:30. Bailey was thoroughly confused and wanted to eat since everyone was awake. He could tell something was up with all of the activity, though, so he was a little pokey. We left the house at 5am promptly!
Thank goodness we were going through security at Savannah airport instead of Atlanta. We arrived at the airport around 5:30 and were through security and sipping on Starbucks by 6:00. The flight to Atlanta was uneventful. We grabbed some Chick Fil A in Atlanta, and got to the gate as they were boarding the flight to Shanghai. The flight was COMPLETELY full. Jerry and I were in the middle row on the plane, and he was in the middle seat. Despite me trying to switch seats with him the entire time, he stayed in the middle and didn't sleep a wink the whole flight. Me? I watched one movie, read some of my book, and slept about 3-4 hours. It was definitely nice to get the heck off the plane. Everyone else with Jerry's class took a taxi to the hotel which, for a 20 mile ride, apparently took over an hour. We took the Maglev then the subway and were at the hotel well before they were. The subway was an experience...a complete mass of humanity. In hindsight it probably wasn't the easiest way to get around with our carry-ons and luggage, but it was a good way to immediately get immersed in Chinese culture!
Once we arrived at the hotel it took all we had to not just pile on the bed and go directly to sleep. We met up with a few of the others from Jerry's group and went to dinner at Jade Garden, a place recommended by the hotel. There were 7 of us, so we traipsed over to the restaurant. We were immediately intimidated. It's bad enough being in a foreign country where you don't know the language....but here you can't even wing it by attempting to decipher the language because you have absolutely no clue what the heck the characters mean. Thankfully they have prepared for stupid Americans and have lots of pictures in their menus :) The restaurant was family style so we ordered all kinds of different dishes - pan fried noodles, a couple different types of dumplings, roasted duck, short ribs, soup. We were sure that at the end of this dinner we were going to owe an arm and a leg...turns out that it was a grand total of $11 a person. Sweet.
Dinner was over and we were back in the hotel by about 9pm. Jerry and I were asleep by 9:30, and were up and at 'em by 9am the next day! I'll blog about that tomorrow...right now it's 12:30am on Sunday here, which means it's 11:30am Saturday back home, just a short 30 minutes from kickoff time for GT-UGA. We're considering listening to the game for at least a bit...till the next post, I've created a Picasa album for folks to keep track of our travels!
