May 9th found us leaving Beijing. We took a 2 and a half hour flight, which was not at all bad, and suddenly found ourselves in Hefei. Everyone was very excited to board the plane that would take us to Hefei in the province of Anhui. The next day we would all be parents!
For the first time ever we got to walk across the tarmac and up the stairs to the plane. That was a lot of fun.
When we arrived in Hefei it was early afternoon. We took a bus from the airport to the Holidy Inn, a ride of about 30 minutes. I'm sure everyone on that bus was thinking of how close we were getting. The Holiday Inn was a great hotel. There was a revolving restaurant on the 24th floor which we loved. We had our camera ready when we got to the room. The photo above was the first thing we saw when we entered. It was almost a physical shock to see the crib and stroller.
We spent some time gathering our thoughts, and then gathering our luggage. We sorted through and put everything we thought we'd need for the next day out on the desk. Then it occurred to us that this was the last day in our lives we would be without a daughter.
Our guide, Chen Chen led us first across the street from the hotel to buy special pens for the paperwork, and then off to Parksons, a gigantic store which contained a basement grocery store and 5 stories of department store above that. Downtown Hefei reminded us a bit of Downtown Crossing in Boston. The area was cordoned off for foot traffic only, and full of all kinds of shops from incense sellers to a KFC!
T
his shot is from the doors of Parksons. Our first day
wandering around with Chen we stayed in one big group and were a bit
intimidated about the whole process. Later however we had no
problem going out in smaller groups or just the three of us.
People were on the whole very nice. Again it was a bit hard to see
a large number of beggars.
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