Today is our Harbin travel day, but we don’t go out until 8:15 pm, so there’s a full day of activities before we leave. Judy gets off to work and I start my daily schedule of stretching, swimming, and table tennis. Lilly’s mom cleaned this afternoon, leaving around 3:15. Judy walked in at 3:30, much earlier than expected. She managed to get away from school quickly. We finished our packing and headed to the taxi at 4:45.

We arrived early for our flight and found a Pizza Hut for dinner. The security line was long, and the officers really know how to “wand” someone. The flight to Harbin was slightly less than two hours, but the seating was tight. We arrived early and walked into the meeting area with our baggage at 10:10, looking for the driver we arranged. Our schedule arrival was 10:15. We waited and waited, and the driver never arrived. Several other travel operators approached us, checking to make sure we weren’t on their lists of clients. We finally made contact with a transportation coordinator from our hotel, The Shangrila, and he put us in a taxi with instructions for the driver.

About 11:00 pm, while we were still in the taxi, driving to the hotel, I got a call from someone speaking Chinese. He hung up, and 5 minutes later, our tour guide for tomorrow called, saying our driver just called, wondering where we were. I explained we had waited a half hour and finally gave up on the driver showing up. She apologized, tried to explain what happened (kinda vague), and confirmed our meeting time for Saturday. We arrived at the hotel at 11:20, checked in, and began to get ready for the next day. It’s supposed to be really cold. We think we’re ready, but there’s a lot of stuff to lay out and organize.