Day 8: Leaving Wuhan, Heading to Guangzhou

Not going to lie...today was REALLY tough.  It was our last day in Wuhan and we had to travel to Guangzhou for the last leg of our journey.  Why was the day tough?  Well it started off well enough with our typical trip to the breakfast buffet where all of Miss Mila's adoring fans had to say goodbye to her one last time.  She is so cute because she happily waves to everyone she sees and says "HI!" or "GOODBYE!"  After breakfast, we headed out to start our day and said goodbye to the Renaissance Hotel, our first home as a family.  Lily, our guide, planned a lunch for us and the Bieker family at a very upscale restaurant called "Prince".  I think she wanted to show the adults a good time in the city but it maybe was not the best choice of a place to go with young toddlers.  It was fancy dining but luckily they contained some of the chaos by putting us in our own room.  It was all traditional Chinese food and luckily the menu had big pictures of the food so we could se what we were getting. We ordered many dishes so that we could all taste test everything.  This is where the stress level cranked up a notch.  This is the first day we were out when it was Mila's nap time.  So first, she got extremely giggly and wanted to run around EVERYWHERE in the room.  As new parents of a toddler, it was tough for us to figure out how not to disturb everyone.  Soon after, Miss Mila decided it was time to let us know she was tired by having a nuclear meltdown and proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs.  Luckily, the Beikers took it in stride because they have young kids too but it definitely made a stressful situation.  Mama and Baba we just kind of frantically trying to figure out what to give her so she would stop crying.  Luckily, she calmed down but mom and dad were pretty frazzled.

After lunch, we had to go to the notary public and get Mila's paperwork finalized in order to apply for her visa in GZ (our guide told us that they are building a US consulate in Wuhan so in the future parents adopting from there won't have to travel to GZ to get the visa).  We've been getting driven everywhere in a huge van so that we could stay with the Beikers for everything.  So we headed into some part of the city where just Michael and Bobby got out to go into the office to finish the paperwork.  Unfortunately, this was also stressful because the lady we were suppose to meet went home ill right before our appointment so the other workers in her office we scrambling to cover her work so it took twice as long to finish there.  Poor Mama and Allizon were stuck in the van with 4 kids for over an hour.  Baba was very nervous getting through the appointment because he was worried that Mama was having to deal with a nightmare in the car.  Luckily it wasn't too bad but we were glad to get out of there.

After the appointment, we headed to the airport.  A LONG 1.5 hour drive out of Wuhan.  We took pics of the city as we left.  Some very bad parts of town.  The traffic was very bad and the driver had a very jerky driving tendency.  So needless to say, we were so glad when we finally got to the airport.  Unfortunately, we had a very late flight scheduled from 6:55-8:00.  But once our guide got us security and we said goodbye to her, we learned that out plane was delayed until 8:10.  What made it worse was that the gate changed 5 times while were were sitting in the terminal.  So here we were in an airport where no one spoke English for like 4 hours trying desperately to keep the kids happy while we waited for our stupid plane to take off.

Once we finally boarded, of course Miss Mila had had enough and decided it was time for another full meltdown.  Poor mama had to bare the brunt of it as Mila kicked and writhed on her lap.  All the while everyone was staring at us.  We will never look down on other parents who have kids crying again!  Luckily, Mila did fall asleep on the plane and we made it to the hotel in GZ at 12:30 at night.  What a LONG day!!!

But our new hotel is very nice and there are a lot of other adoptive parents here.  We will be here for a week before we head home.