We flew very early on Wednesday 4/24.. when Ted had about 3 hours of sleep after doing the late shift at the hospital. Flight delays and all, we arrived at Ohare at 10am or so on Wednesday. We were able to head over to the Sheraton to drop off our bags, and then back to the airport to take the train into downtown Chicago! We were both tired enough to be loopy at this point, but we hopped off the train in downtown and went exploring.
First stop was a delightful Crepes Bistro where we stuffed ourselves on said Crepes as well as some beer and nummy wine. We continued to wander for a bit, but truthfully.. it was super windy and cold and we hadn't dressed well! We went back to Monk's Pub where Ted a delightfully good time. By 2pm, we were very tired and felt very old. We trained back to our hotel where we napped and laid there like old people for the rest of the night. We even went down to dinner where we sat with even older people than us.
We were up and much more refreshed the next morning and on the train into downtown at 8:30am for our 10am visa appointment. We didn't navigate downtown as well as we had hoped.. lots of lovely walking but not so much punctuality had us a bit late for our appointment, but nobody seemed to care much.
Once we made it up to the desk we did have something rather concerning issues come up, despite my meticulous planning. They were not impressed by our Fana agency license, and I needed to call Fana directly to have another one sent up pronto, which worked (PRAISE THE LORD). The same thing happened to us last time 5 years ago. They were also concerned by Ted's level of travel in Colombia with MMI, and that he did not technically have a visa for that although he did enter the country legally and report exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it with. We were eventually able to resolve the issue, but we will definitely take notes for next time!!
Finally, Colombian adoption visas in hand, we celebrated.
After a ridiculous amount of really good pork at the Purple Pig as well as some rather fantastic wine, we were off to the Chicago Art Museum. We tracked down the Ethiopian and Colombian exhibits as well
Even though I needed 2 giant lattes to wake up after all of our sleep deprivation and pork, we were able to walk over to a Chicago culture building that had additional exhibits. That evening, we took the train to meet our old friends Gabe and Laura Cook at De Cero, which was another fancy taco joint near their downtown highrise. After fancy tacos, we then went back to their apartment to catch up and enjoy some much needed adult people time before the next part of our adventure begins!
We arrived home early Friday morning and started to wrap up our life here as a family of four for the past few days. Now that we have all of our travel documents and our clearance to enter the country for adoption, we are ready to fly!
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