boy, that's a lot of balls...

It's 3am and I'm sitting on the floor in my hotel room (2bdrm, 2bath apartment really) with the hard-wired LAN connection because I can't get the wireless to work for some reason... I think it's probably the cheap router they have installed. Something tells me I'm not going to get anyone up here to fix it at 3am.


Maria and I arrived yesterday (Saturday 10/6) into Hanoi right on time at 10am. We met another person in my adoption party at the airport. She's traveling alone until her husband arrives on 10/22. The facilitator from the agency met us at the airport and we loaded our 100's of lbs of luggage into the very small van. It's a good thing we never found the other family we were supposed to meet, I'm not sure where we would have put them.


I brought several things with me that I won't be carrying home beyond diapers and wipes - mainly things for the orphanage kids and their caretakers. For the kids I brought play dough, crayons (a big box of 96, the one I always wanted as a kid), construction paper, wooden blocks, receiving blankets for the babies and a big clear plastic bag full of 100 brightly colored plastic balls. I had to carry the bag of balls onto the plane, there were too many things to check in when we arrived at the airport. Needless to say I raised a few eyebrows. As we were leaving the Cathay Pacific flight in Hong Kong, one of the flight attendants says to me "Boy, you've got a lot of balls"... he, he...

A bag of balls is definitely a conversation starter... several people asked me what it was for (I guess 2 women traveling without any children with a bag of balls seems strange?) At one point I told our male flight attendant that we planned to take them out 1/2 way through the flight just to keep it from getting boring. I think he believed me... he looked a little scared.

When a few people in the Hong Kong airport asked, I found myself with about a 2-3 second delay where I looked the person over and decided... "do I tell them the whole story, or just say they are for some kids I'm visiting". Most of the time I went for the latter, but one lady volunteered that she was on her way to adopt a son from Ho Chi Minh city - and she already has 5 kids from China and one other from Vietnam - all special needs kids. To me, that puts her in a whole different league.

We traveled by van from the airport to Hanoi. One of the first things we saw was a guy on a scooter with cages on the back and about a dozen little pigs in each cage. Lila, this time they were alive! And once again, I didn't have my camera... but take my word for it, they were real. Of course there were water buffalo along the road and as we got into town we played chicken with families of 5 on scooters. I'm always amazed how a kid can sleep in his mother's arms on a scooter here. I won't be trying that.

We are staying at the Somerset Grand Hanoi - a very nice residence hotel - in a 2bdrm, 2 bath apartment. We got into the room about 1pm and took showers and had some lunch. Then we made it down to the convenience supermarket below the hotel for provisions - chips, crackers, bread, peanut butter and jelly and water, milk, coffee and wine. The good news is, one can get good french wine in Hanoi for very low prices...

We both feel asleep around 7pm... and now we are awake. Maria says we shouldn't even try to get on the right time zone, because Hai will be getting us up around this time anyway. I figure, hey, he's almost 10months old, he'll be sleeping through the night, right? Right...

We're still scheduled to pick him up on Monday, but one families' plane doesn't get in until very late Sunday night, so we're hoping there are no delays. For now, we're safely ensconced in our lovely apartment. Hope everyone is doing great!

Melissa