Day 4 The Great Snow Storm

Sunday started off normally enough well sort of. Forrest awoke at 2:42 am to doors slamming and fighting in Chinese in the next room. The people must have been drunk and fought for about 30 minutes. Everyone else slept through it. Then at 4 Robin was wide awake so we got up to start getting ready to leave.

When we looked out we saw a beautiful snow was falling. We had breakfast and notice the snow getting harder. We met George and the others at 7:30 to head to the airport. Then we noticed it was quite a lot of snow maybe 3 or 4 inches by now. It took about 1.5 hours to get to the airport in the snow slickened roads but our flight was still scheduled for a 10:25 departure.

Airports in China are very different. We checked in and our baggage was slightly over weight so you go to another line to pay for that then back to the first line to get your tickets. We had to go to a third line to check in our baby carrier then to security. We made it to the gate and our flight still said on time. I checked as it got closer to time and the lady said maybe 1 moment late. Well by 11 we realized maybe a long moment and the snow was piling up and no snow plows in sight. We found monitors and they showed many flights delayed though out counter still showed us on schedule even though it is noon and we show an on time departure of 10:25. We realized things were getting worse. We called our guide and begged him to get us train tickets, he said no just wait a little while the trains are delayed too.

Well we waited and waited some more. By about 3 Forrest demanded to speak with a manager that spoke English. The lady was very nice and came out to our gate to visit with us. She stated that they did not know what would happen and we could rebook or keep waiting. She did offer to refund our tickets so we could find another way. By 6:30 the lady called back and said you should rebook flight snow getting very bad. All this time the girls at the counter kept saying “no time or wait 1 moment” Chinenglish is difficult and my Mandarin is bad.

During the wait the girls met 3 children 2 girls and 1 boy all about 6 years old. They became friends in spite of the language barrier. Laura gave them some candy bracelets and then the Chinese kids gave our girls some large pencils with flags on them. These kids played together for hours exchanging candy, trinkets and having a fun time. When we had to leave the girls were broken hearted to leave their new friends behind. I will post aphoto of them together when time permits.

We called George our guide and told him what we were doing. We could not find him so we went to the counter to change our tickets. George got there and had a huge argument with the guy in Chinese. The whole group of people stopped talking to watch us. Finally the airline guy who spoke some English asked what we wanted to do. I thought George may know something I did not so we said keep tickets. OK about 20 minutes later George says “now we go exchange tickets and sleep at hotel” By this time about 400 flights have been cancelled and we go to another line to exchange tickets. Forrest stood in this line for 1.5 hours while Robin and the girls had no idea where we were. We get up there and exchange our tickets for a flight the next day. All the while Forrest is pushing George to get someone working on train tickets. The lines were huge we saw some Chinese people get so upset that a bit of a fight broke out and the police took a man and a woman away.

During this time we learned that Maria would be boarding a train to Zhengzhou at 10:30 that night. The girls were so tired that they both fell asleep on a bench in the airport. Several nice Chinese people helped Robin with the girls as we waited.

Another funny thing is now we have waited so long there are no hotel rooms near the airport so we finally get out of the airport about 9 and finally find a driver and van to take us back to Beijing. We ride for 1.5 hours on horrible roads back to the same hotel we had left that morning.

Our new room had a wonderful view of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. After lots of phone calls we finally get to bed around midnight not knowing the plan for Monday. OK about 1 am George called and told us he had train tickets and we had to meet him at 5 am in the lobby. So we change our wake up call to 4 am and try to sleep a little more.

Long story short after 12 hours stuck in the airport, a long drive back to the hotel a ton of prayers from our friends, a little sleep now we have train tickets and manage to get on the train to Zhengzhou at 6:50 Monday morning. This will put us in Zhengzhou by noon the same time we should have landed the previous day, only 24 hours late. This entry was typed up on a very nice high speed train as we went through the Chinese country side.

God is good and has provided a way for us to get there though it was not our plan at all. We appreciate George and our adoption agency that have worked with us throughout the evening and night to try and keep us on track.