Our Daughter Lina

Tomorrow, Tuesday November 29th, will be a 40-hour day for us, thanks to the 16-hour time shift between China time and PST. We’re ready to go home, but we have some trepidation about the 12-hour flight from Beijing to San Francisco with a baby, followed by immigration, customs, and then another flight to SeaTac. She was great on the flight from Hangzhou to Beijing today, but that was just a couple hours. We leave Beijing at 1:55 pm Lina time, and if all goes well we’ll arrive in Seattle at 1:17 pm the same day. Then we get to go home and start getting Lina and ourselves acclimated to Pacific Standard Time.

When Lina enters the US (in San Francisco), she’ll automatically become a US citizen, because she’ll be entering on an IR-3 visa. If only one of us had traveled to bring her home, she’d have to be on an IR-4 and we’d have a bunch more paperwork to do. We still have to go through immigration to finalize the documentation. At the US Consulate in Guangzhou, we received the famous “brown envelope”, which we must carry and deliver to the immigration officers upon entry to the US; we don’t get to open it and we’ll never see the contents (mostly paperwork we’ve already completed, I gather).

I had hoped to be able to post some of the pictures from last week and a few from Hangzhou, but apparently I can’t upload pictures over this connection so those will have to wait until next time I connect, which will be from home!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 04:29 and is filed under lina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.