Good Morning from Tokyo!

Good morning from Tokyo! I enjoyed our last day in Fuzhou a lot. In the early morning we went to the village market (finally). That was really quite an experience. There was booth after booth of people selling fruits and veggies, live fish, clams, breakfast buns, pearls and much more. I took a pretty good video while I was walking through. We went to our little breakfast joint with Malia and got Bon Mien and dumplings for the last time. I went to the main house to be with the kids for a while after that and helped get them to school. I said goodbye to them, which was hard but not unbearable. They're in great hands. I can't even explain how unbelievably amazing that place is. My precious little 4 year old with downs was definitely the hardest to say goodbye to. I have big prayers for that girl. I really hope she finds a family soon. She just is so sweet and cuddly. Malia promised to send me picture updates of the kiddos.

I finished up my bunny in the workshop and Debbie finished up her quilt. We said goodbye to Malia, Shi Yu and little Jaden too. Kyler took us to a shuttle bus and we rode through Fuzhou to get to the airport. We were all 4 very comfy in our spread our seats until the one stop before the airport.

Apparently there are assigned seats on a shuttle bus. We were scolded and made to move by the other people getting on the bus. I moved from my nice 2 seats to my self to next to guy who smelled like he'd never heard of deodorant in his life 🤢. The lady next to Debbie even made her put her seat belt on.

At the Fuzhou airport, our flight was promptly delayed an hour. We had a scare with thinking our flight was going to be delayed another 4 hours, which would have threw off our entire trip! Luckily it wasn't actually our flight! We flew from Fuzhou to Hong Kong from 9:30pm-12:00. Our flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo boarded at 1:00am. It was already going to be a tight fit, but then we had to park the plane "remotely" so we climbed down stairs out of the plane and boarded shuttle busses that took us to the airport. We had to go through bag checks AGAIN. Luckily there was a lady waiting for us to show us to our flight! We ran through the massive Hong Kong airport and made it on the flight just barely! That flight was from 1am to 5:30am (with an extra hour in there for time change) making it 6:30am when we arrived in Tokyo. I think we all slept pretty well through the majority of the flight. I figured out that if I take my backpack and put it on my lap, it makes a great pillow. When we landed in Tokyo, dazed and half awake, we found our gate and planted our baggage in our spot. Debbie stayed with the stuff while us other 3 did a little shopping. Shyla had a hay day with all the Studio Ghibli stuff! We also had a few interesting snacks here in the airport. I can tell we're getting closer to the states because we're finally getting less gaping stares and pictures taken. We were joking about how many hundreds of Chinese people have our picture on their phones. It's seriously unreal. Everywhere we went we got anything from a stare, to a laugh and point, or people running to take pictures with us, people thinking they're being sneaky taking pictures, then others who just blatantly point and stare and openly take pictures. It was funny at first but it really got old after a while. A few times people would stop and stare on the street and follow us with their eyes and when they took a picture I would stick my tongue out. They never really reacted lol. Our next flight leaves at 10:30, so in just about an hour. This flight will be 10 hours from Tokyo to Dallas, then a few hours from Dallas to Springfield. I'm planning on sleeping as much as possible on this flight! Next post will hopefully be from Springfield!!

There plane didn't leave until 11:58 and they will arrive in Dallas at 9:27 am. It's 11:45 pm here and they have about 10 hours left on the flight.

Sayonara Tokyo!