March Madness in China

I'm not talking about our brackets here (although Jon suffered a severe hit with Duke going down), but the kind of madness that we've been having this month over here. We've been searching for a new apartment, which is positively hilarious in China. Every single place we've looked at makes a freshman guys dorm room feel like paradise. They haven't yet caught on to the idea of 'staging' a place to make it more appealing. Instead, we walk in to pools of soy sauce on the floor, random items left behind by the last tenant and dust piled up like MN snow drifts. Needless to say, the real estate agents are so excited to help us, that we regularly get a chance to see apartments that don't even come close to meeting the requirements we've told them we want. "We're looking for a clean, un-furnished apartment, with 2 bathrooms." Agent: "Oh, okay, let's go see these two places we've got that are suitable for you." The first one has dust piles in every corner, smells like a dumpster and has 1 bathroom. Strike 1. We are polite and say something like "Thanks, but it doesn't quite have what we are looking for...", and we move on to the second one. There is soo much furniture crammed into this place that we can hardly walk anywhere! We're talking full living room set, full bedroom sets, large Chinese vases, random kitchen table set and tons of other junk. Not exactly UN-furnished. Still, we find the humor in these moments and give our best foreigner smile and positive attitude to the agents, thanking them so much for their time.

After many days of seeing places that make us cringe, we happen upon an agent who has helped other foreigners like us find a nice new apartment. She's very kind, and says she understands the kind of place we are looking for, and she has one that sounds just perfect for us. We don't get our hopes up too high as she walks us through a beautiful neighborhood, filled with cherry blossoms, sunshine and amazing landscaping. We arrive at a building in the back of the complex, hop in the elevator and go all the way up to the 18th floor, the top of the building. As she turns the key in the door, we catch a glimpse of a place that makes our hearts smile so big. It REALLY was clean! It REALLY had 2 bathrooms! It REALLY had no furniture. AND, it had an incredible view of the mountain we love to climb.

So last weekend, we sealed the deal on that place, and are so excited to get ourselves moved over in the next month or so.

In addition to that madness...we've experienced some other mad goodness this month:
~ We've raised nearly $9,000 towards our adoption! This is an insane amount of money, and we feel overwhelmed at the generosity of our family & friends.
~ We have FINISHED one big step in our adoption process! This month, we wrapped up our Home Study process, which is one very large step now behind us. We are moving on to Immigration Forms and gathering our Dossier.
~ We both had birthdays this month, and celebrated by taking a couple days away at a beautiful little guesthouse near Dali. You can see below that we were surrounded by a peaceful village atmosphere - it was a great escape from the busy city life in Kunming!
~ And another wild thing happened this month...STARBUCK'S began construction on their first shop in Kunming. Yes, we are very, very excited. Please consider increasing your support by about $20/month so we can indulge. kidding...