Nanning!!

We are now in Nanning. This is the capital city of Guangxi Province and where we will meet Hannah TOMORROW!! Hannah's orphanage is not located in Nanning, but because this is the capital city it is where the orphanages of this particular province bring the babies (we are not allowed to visit the orphanages in this province at this time). There are 13 families here with our adoption agency and all of us will meet our babies tomorrow. We are all on edge...nerves, exhaustion, hormones, tension...they are all running high. Hopefully we can all get some sleep tonight...doubtful, buy maybe??

I'm posting some pictures of our day yesterday in Beijing. It was a fun day and we got to see some amazing sights. We started in Tienanmen Square...the largest public square in the world. This is the location where the political protests occurred in 1989 by primarily students seeking democratic reform. You might remember the now very famous picture of the lone student standing in front of 4 military tankers? Oh yeah, that place...now you remember??

Next we visited the Forbidden City....Now known as the Palace Museum...it is the world's largest palace complex. Until 1924 when the last emperor of China was driven from the Inner Court, fourteen emperors of the Ming dynasty and ten emperors of the Qing dynasty had reigned here...for some five centuries. Within the walls surrounding the city are 9,999 buildings. Needless to say, it was an amazing sight and impossible to imagine that much wealth and power.

Our last stop was the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall of China is over 4,000 miles long and took centuries to complete. Matt and I climbed up 3 different levels...and it was an intense, straight up ascension! Coming down was almost as bad because it was so incredibly steep. But it was yet another amazing sight and again impossible to imagine the magnitude of its construction.

On our drive back to the hotel we saw out the bus window the Bird's Nest as it is called...the location of the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The amount of construction and hotels is astonishing!! It certainly appears that there will be more than enough rooms for all the visitors to Beijing because there are enormous hotels everywhere!!

Ok, so tomorrow is the big day! I think we are ready. We have the diaper bag packed, we bought the formula the orphanage uses, we have bottles, a baby crib (more on that in a later post)...all we need is a baby! I told Matt we should really go out and party it up tonight because our lives will be so very different tomorrow. The sad thing is we are too tired to go out and don't feel like dealing with the language barrier, the crowds, the heat...think we will just stay inside and wait until tomorrow!! We are so very ready to have her with us.