Mar 20, 2008

March Madness!

Well, I've decided that filling out the NCAA tournament bracket is 100 times easier than trying to arrange flights to China!
I finally heard back from CCAI yesterday, they had just received confirmation that the paperwork processing in Tianjin will take 5 days, not the 7 days that they had been told. That's good because it cuts two extra days out of our trip!
So, I started discussing travel dates with them... we already knew that we didn't want to travel at the end of April because of the trade fair in Guangzhou and there's also the issue of the International Labor Day holiday from May 1st thru 4th. We should be able to travel during that time and do our touring in Beijing, but the big question is will the orphanage let us have Gotcha Day on May 5th just after the holiday?
We really don't know the answer to this, so CCAI is going to have their Tianjin rep contact the orphanage to find out. If they say yes, we'll plan on leaving the last week of April and have Gotcha Day on the 5th. If they say no, we'll leave the first week of May and have Gotcha Day on the 12th.
Hopefully I'll hear something tomorrow, but I really expect it to be Monday. Once we get that confirmation we can request our consulate appointment and then start booking our tickets.
In the meantime I've been trying to figure out flight options for us. We got super spoiled on our last trip when we flew Singapore Air, I just don't know if we can fly a United or Northwest. The quality of Singapore Air just blew the US airlines away!
There's the possibility that we can use our AmEx points to get discounted tickets on Cathay Pacific, just need to know dates before I check on availability!

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