Long couple of days

It has been a long couple of days, with not much sleep. We got in from the airport late last night or actually this morning and were up early for Joseph's medical exam and shots. Please pray his TB skin test comes back negative. More later after sleep.

Joseph already mastering the DS.

Our little interpreter makes shopping a little easier.

We played imaginary baseball at the Taiyuan airport. We should have a picture of the locals looking at us. They thought we were a little loco and we proved 'em right.

Sounds of silence

All,

Steve and Lynley will be with out internet access for a day or so. Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers

Jarrett

Gotcha Day

Our first sighting of Joseph from the 5th floor window of the Civil Affairs Office as he got out of the car.

Our first encounter. He was very reserved, but you wouldn't know it now!

Joseph feeling more at ease.

Part of the Pizza Hut menu. We had fried calamari as our appetizer. Joseph loved it!

FINALLY - We have Joseph

We have Joseph and all is well!!! PRAISE GOD!!! Everyone is asleep.

We are all exhausted and Steve is sick.  Please pray for healing for
him quickly!  We have an early appointment so we'll try to post
pictures to see your Wednesday night late.

(This is Jarrett posting for the Jackson's)- I know you really want to see some
pictures so I snapped this when I talked to them on SKYPE

Run away Crab and dirty Carpet

So, this is what color the carpet used to be! Yikes, not walking barefoot here!

There was a Christian Dior fashion shoot across from our hotel. You should have seen the number of cabs stopped to check out the beauties.

It is quite obvious that they are not used to seeing many foreigners here. It is very unlike Beijing and Guangzhou where we spent most of our time last year with May Lee. Even in the hotel we can't find anyone that can speak English, other than the occasional "Hello." We finally realized why everyone was staring at our shoes, we think it is actually at our legs, as we have all had on shorts. They don't wear shorts here. We walked with the Stevens (from Chicago), the other family adopting from this province, to find a restaurant for lunch.

On our second try we found a place with a picture menu, and some dishes were even in English!! Of course no one spoke a lick of it, but we managed. We refrained from the braised donkey meat or the fragrant skin jelly, but ordered what we think was a chicken dish and the other dish, well, all we knew was it had peanuts in it. They were pretty good. The food we ordered did not have English labels and we couldn't find any pictures of rice or noodles, so that was quite commical trying to order that.

We went to the Gongshuzi Temple, an ancient temple from the Ting Dynasty. It is a Buddhist temple, but not active anymore to worship, but they still come and bow to Buddha and leave incense and fruit offerings.

Wassuuuup?

This Cypress tree is 3,000 years old. We were wanting to count the rings to see if this was really true... but we didn't have a chain saw handy.

Steve thought this would be a great place for our summer home.

This place give great power. The muscles are strong in this one.

We went to a really nice restaurant for dinner. Though you walk in and you see tanks full of various fish, turtles, crab, etc. We wanted to order the crab, but he got away. It was quite entertaining watching the girls try to catch the runaway crab. He was quite quick! Our guide was with us and ordered our dinner for us. It was a beautiful presentation, then you taste the "chicken", and it wasn't so beautiful anymore. I think it was more like chicken knuckle.

Everything else was pretty good though.

Our dinner escaped!

We ate dinner in this beautiful restaurant.

We are so excited about getting Joseph!! We leave in a few hours to meet him at the civil affairs office. It will be about 2:00 in the morning your Wednesday when we get him, so by the time you probably get this he will be with us FINALLY!!!!!

We finally made it to China!

We finally made it to China! We landed in Beijing our yesterday

afternoon(Monday) and met our guide, Maggie who told us we wouldn't get Joseph until Wednesday afternoon, now!! We were supposed to get him our Monday, your Sunday, but because of the weather delay and missing the flight, we have to wait 2 days. I (Lynley) was trying to hold back the tears, when our guide, for some reason, proceeds to tell us how much Joseph has been crying because he doesn't like the orphanage. I don't know what else she said, I stepped off, I didn't want to hear anymore.

We met Robin Hill at the Beijing airport to give him 3 large suitcases full of medical supplies that were given to us for the Hope Foster Home for special needs children that he and his wife Joyce run.

Joseph was under their care for several years. That is where Steve met Joseph two years ago. Joseph was sent back to his original orphanage about 5 weeks ago, which is part of the adoption process.

The blessing of missing our flight was that our next flight to Shanxi was not for another 5 hours, so Robin took us back to the Hope Foster Home. There are probably about 50 kids there now. We were able to visit with Robin, Joyce and Katie, their daughter who is about Graham's age. Graham, Katie said, "Hi!" and was disappointed that she didn't get to see you, and says she misses you! They made us a delicious dinner, we even had special HUGE potatoes that are especially grown for McDonald's fries. Half of one of the potatoes is bigger than our large potatoes. They also gave us some of Joseph's "school work", where they had made him some books, and he had done some writing. Oh, it is so hard to be here and wait for him!

This is Crystal, Joseph's nanny. She is standing to the left of his crib.


Robin and Katie took us back to the airport. We took a domestic flight from Beijing to Tiayuan, the capital of Shanxi, the province Joseph is from. Joseph is 6-8 hours away in Lin Fen City. At the airport we were totally on our own, and the only white people around.

We were glad when we landed in the right city, but a little leery of finding three young guys waiting to put us in a van. It was a little scarey, especially when we had $10,000 cash hanging around our necks.

This is Gerome, our new guide, here in Tiayuan, in front of our hotel.

Here is $7000 changed into RMB, which equaled a little over 47,000RMB, for our orphanage fees. That was fun walking that down the side streets back to the hotel!

This is one view from our hotel window, 16th floor.

Here is another view.

Our blog is blocked here. We cannot access it, so we are going to try to email a friend to post it for us.

Chicago Images (What?)

The Jacksons are suckin' it up again this year. Well, we missed our flight to China again! If you remember last year when we were going to China to get May Lee, we missed our flight to Beijing. The good part last year was that a crew member was late, so the airlines took responsibility and paid for our lunch and hotel in Washington. We missed a day of touring in Beijing, but it didn't affect our timing for getting May Lee. We had many little things go wrong, lost luggage, etc., so we made a Jackson Motto - Suck It Up. So here we are again, but this time we are in Chicago and because the delay was weather-related all financial responsibility falls on us. What is so devastating to us is that we were supposed to get Joseph Monday - China time, but your Sunday night (China is 13 hours ahead). We had no touring day cushion this time. We are unsure how things will work out and how this affects the rest of our trip. We are waiting to hear when and how we get Joseph now. We leave on the same flight, just leaving a day later, leaving at 12:40 p.m. Sunday and arriving in Beijing the next day at 3:30 p.m., your Monday, our Tuesday.

Background info: we boarded in Nashville but sat on the runway for an hour and a half unable to take off because of visibility issues in Chicago. Of course I (Lynley) immediately cried and then prayed. We landed, and found our connecting flight to China had been delayed, so we thought we would make it, but then our plane sat for another hour after landing unable to get to a gate assignment to de-board. When we finally got out, we sprinted a mile to the departing gate to find the plane had already left. Instead of the "Journey to Joseph" it felt more like "The Amazing Race to Joseph". It was a roller coaster of emotions as the plans kept changing.

Please pray against the enemy as many things are going "wrong". Coleman has stayed cool and is reminding us the Lord is in control; He's going to work it out.

So, we sucked it up and tried to make the best of it. Good thing these clothes are comfortable because we'll be sportin' 'em tomorrow as well - no luggage. We took a cab to the Sears Tower. You can see our name is honored here as well. The elevator took us up 103 floors. We learned the Sears Tower is 283 Barack Obama's high. Here we are laying on the glass ceiling, freaky!

We had Chicago style pizza for dinner at Giordano's. Coleman said it was the best pizza he'd ever eaten. We all agreed, but then again, thought it could be because it was the only meal we'd eaten since 7:00 a.m.. We then headed out to Dave & Busters for a little fun.