What is Where?

I know that I definitely did not know much at all about China when we started this process, especially where certain cities were located, so I thought it might be helpful to educate others as well. Let's start with the big picture...

See Kyrgyzstan? The little yellow-colored country on the Northwest side of China? Yep, that's where Jonas is from. Only the Tien Shan mountain range separates his homeland from hers. Now let's zoom in a bit...

Our girl is from the Jiangxi province. It's the greenish colored one in the Southeast side of the country. Beijing is straight North of there, indicated by the B in the Hebei province. We'll also have to travel to the Guangdong province, South of Jiangxi (in yellow). We'll probably fly out of Hong Kong, indicated by the H just South of Guangdong. Time to zoom in some more...

Here's our probable path of travel. I totally copied this map from another adoptive family! We'll probably fly into Beijing and get over our jet lag while hopefully doing a bit of sightseeing for a day or two. Then we'll head to Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, probably by bullet train. That's where we'll pick up our daughter and spend a few days doing paperwork. After that, we'll head to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, probably via another bullet train. Our girl will have a medical exam done there. That's also where the US embassy is located, so we'll get her visa. From there, we'll probably take a bus to Hong Kong and fly home. Okay, one more map...

So our daughter currently lives in a foster home on the grounds of the Fuzhou orphanage. Fuzhou is a city that's a bit Southeast of Nanchang, a couple of hours away by car. You can find it above the 'X' and 'I' in Jiangxi on this map! We are hopeful that we'll be able to take a day trip from Nanchang to visit her orphanage and possibly her foster family. Fuzhou in Jiangxi is not to be confused with the more well-known Fuzhou in the Fujian province to the East.

Well, hope that was helpful for getting an idea of where things are in China. Just don't ask me how to pronounce any of these words correctly! Now if our girl's official file would just come in, we could start getting a lot closer to getting to all these places!