I've been wanting to share the story of our adoption journey, but I just haven't been able to write it all out. I think I'm ready now. :)
With only two weeks notice of our travel, we set off as a family of four to make the long journey to Taiwan. Unfortunately, a few days before we left we heard that a Supertyphoon was headed toward Taiwan. We didn't know what to do. We decided to travel as planned...I mean really, what else would we do? We arrived in Taiwan on a Sunday morning at around 6 AM, and when we had gotten close to Taiwan the flight was very turbulent. I felt really sick...so sick in fact that I had grabbed the airsick bag, and if we had landed 30 seconds later I would have had to use it. Luckily, we landed, and for some reason I had the foresight to take the airsick bag with me. Well, several times on the way to our hotel my 4 year old "used the bag". Yikes! Our driver and his son were so gracious about it. I had planned to be so culturally aware and do everything right after all my research, but with my sick little girl my good intentions went out the window. She was a trooper, and we made it to the hotel. We found out later that we were the last flight in to Taiwan, and 90 flights were cancelled for that day.
We were scheduled to meet our daughter on Monday afternoon, but our appointment was postponed until Tuesday due to the weather. It was neat to watch the hotel prepare for the typhoon. We couldn't resist taking a picture of the typhoon message board in the lobby (see the picture at the top of this post). They also tied the lobby doors shut with ropes. The city was totally dead, which we later learned is not the norm for Taipei. We later found out that the government had mandated that for Sunday and Monday no one was to go outside. Since our meeting time was postponed, we also missed our AIT appointment which was originally scheduled for Tuesday. What a mess...when we tried to reschedule, we found out that AIT was closed on Wednesday for an in-service day. Normally it takes 24 hours after the appointment for them to prepare the visa. After a very stressful few days, we had an AIT appointment for Thursday morning. Our flight was scheduled to leave Thursday evening, and we had no idea if our visa would be ready or not. By the grace of God...with help from the wonderful man at AIT, they stopped printing on everyone else's visa and had ours done in HALF AN HOUR!!!! So we picked up the visa and flew home as scheduled.
In this post, it sounds so nice and neat...but you have no idea how stressful it was while we were living it. Not to mention that our whole trip was pretty much spent inside the hotel. My husband did a little sightseeing with some Taiwanese colleagues from his company, but the girls and I stayed inside during the nasty weather. My oldest daughter talks about how much she loved Taiwan...she thinks the hotel room and breakfast buffet were Taiwan. Haha. Someday we'll go back. And I'm still so glad we experienced the trip as a family.
