Conference Call

So we left the kids downstairs for an hour and joined many, many other families to hear all the different steps after referral (which we do not YET have.)  Very exciting...and very dull.

Basically the important points interesting to me parts are our agency arranges all the in country travel though we can book our own flights to China or use their recommended travel agency.  Kind of reassuring really.

Because White Swan in Guangzhou is being renovated our group will stay at the Marriott.  This makes Oak happy to know since he has been researching hotels and will now know which reviews are actually useful.

She said Guangzhou so often I thought for sure I would remember how to pronounce it, but it has already left my head.

Once our agency receives a Travel Invitation (TA in everyone else's language) they'll let us know immediately and we'll know our travel dates 3 days to 2 weeks later.  Our travel dates will be 1 day to 6 weeks after that...usually 2-3 weeks.  

I am not looking forward to THAT waiting game while trying to prepare, packing, and figuring out who will watch SnapDragon and Sunflower on which days without knowing which days need watching. 

Oh, and they had some questions about cost so she said alot about the range of plane tickets to and from and why they might be different for everyone and then ended with "typically around $2000 per adult...assuming you go there and back."  Where else would we go?

After the conference call they had a time for questions, but we couldn't unmute.  So I called back and spoke directly to our China representative at the head office in another state. Nice to connect a voice with the name.  She'll e-mail us the travel packet that we would get after referral anyway but we like things early.  In fact we have a travel packet, it was just prepared in 2006 so not too useful.

We did get the snow predicted, so I better go make some phone calls to cancel my evening plans.  So far we've stayed inside today...it is really cold out.