Excitement with bumps in the road....

Long Shan Temple - worshippers burning incense inside the temple Snake Alley
Alex near the waterfall at Taroko Gorge
The wonders of Taroko Gorge

Well - we did not get our ruling today (Monday) So what this means is that we have to stay in TaiChung tomorrow and perhaps longer with Kai-Yi. It's so frustrating! The lady at the agency here is hard to understand, but it seems that she thinks the courts are not telling the truth about sending the document. We cannot go to the court to pick it up because the final document is the only one, and it's supposidly in transit via the mail. We are assuming at this point that we will have to change our flights home. It's unclear whether or not we will have another AIT paperwork appointment scheduled soon, or if we will have to wait week(s) for another.

We also know now that we will be meeting Kai-Yi's grandparents. This is so exciting for us and such a wonderful blessing for Kai-Yi. They have visited him 2 times since he has been in foster care, so we imagine today will be tough on our little guy. We're anxious and nervous.

We are frustrated by the changes and the unclairty of everything, but feel ok about what we have to do. At least we get to see him tomorrow and we know that he will be with us tomorrow at our hotel - we don't have to be seperated from him anymore. It's hard to focus on the good, but we are trying! It's also difficult to have this added stress - on top of all the nervousness and excitment of trying to become new parents. The excitement of meeting our son is definitly the strongest feeling. We are definitly wondering what we got ourselves into! We are so excited!

We had a great visit to the Taroko Gorge today (well, until we called our agency from the tour) It's one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen! We were with a very diverse group of people, which made it an even more fun experience! A couple from Germany who were both men, a woman from Mexico (who we were impressed by - she spoke very little english and no chinese!), a man from Korea and a man from Japan.

We also had a BLAST at Snake Alley Market last night! What a fun place, although a little ghetto! There are fun arcades for kids (or us) and we won all kinds of little trinkets from the crane game machines. We were so bad at it, the workers kept opening up the machines and "rigging" it so we could win! We also bought a cute outfit for Leo and got 40 minute foot massages! It was not what we expected - they hit us and pushed very hard. At first it hurt, but the result was amazing! Snake Alley is very odd - there are pornography shops right next to little kids games - and really only one place with a snake, but whatever, we had fun! We were the only people there who spoke english, that's for sure!

Long Shan Temple was probably Katie's favorite place so far! It was just simply amazing to see! There were still Chinese New Year Lantern decorations up and people worshiping everywhere! It was really cool!

We went back to the Taipei 101 area and ate at Chilis - adventurous, huh? and we strolled around the common square there. There was a man selling straws that he had shaped into animals on the street! We watched as he made a dragon, which we purchased and plan on putting in Leo's room as a work of art - it is so cool! I will try to post a picture of it soon. For now, It's in Liz's room with half of our luggage that we don't want to drag to Taichung with us.

By the way, Liz's daughter Sarah is just beautiful! She has the most inquisitive eyes and mommy reports that she is such a good girl! Congratulations!

Well, we're not 100% sure we will have internet access at our new "home base" but we will try to post gotcha day pictures when we can. Cross your fingers for us, we need it. Everything is still a mess for us!

PS - this post was really written on Monday evening and Tuesday morning - so we are literally leaving in 1 hour 55 minutes to start our trek to TaiChung. Oh, we are so excited!