Wrap up

We're all happy to be back home where we can have cold drinks with ice, use tap water to brush our teeth and in most cases speak English to people who will generally understand us. Kate is specially happy to be back where people won't stare,, to be in her own room and to be sleeping in her very own bed. Its the sleeping, of course, that will be a problem for all of us because we are still on China time which is 12 hours ahead of New York. It's 2:30 in the afternoon now but I'm so tired because in my mind it's 2:30 am in
the morning. I just want to lie down and sleep.

Instead we will be going out to get a hamburger as soon as the tennis match between Nadel and Federer is over! Which is a good thing because for the last two weeks I've not had to make any decisions. In China my most serious decision was what to wear in the morning...after that all other decisions were made for us. No thinking about what you're going to do, what restaurant to go to and once there what you're going to eat. It was all on the itinerary. It's no brainer to arrive at a restaurant, sit with the other parents at the adult's table and just watch the food come out of the kitchen. My cooking, housekeeping, and creating menu skiills are definitely rusty.

But we are finding the New York air this July 4th weekend cool and almost arctic after the heat of Shanghai which at 9:30 am on the morning we left, was so hot that I almost didn't visit an amazing 4 story English language boostore that had everything from Danielle Steele to Nathanial Hawthorne.

One of our first tasks today has been to go through our mail and so I had some time this morninf to read Paul Goldberger's recent piece for the New Yorker about the architecture of Beijing which he thinks is stunning. It is stunning as is some of the Shanghai architecture where they are erecting phantasmagorical buildings shaped like pretzels, like bottles, like fans. But for me the thing I really noticed about Beijing's architecture was the size of the buildings. They are truly enormous. Gigantic even. Also for me Beijing was a big dusty sprawling frontier town where in certain seasons the dust from the Gobi still sweeps in. People are always on the move, rushing about in some aimless but restless pattern that I could never understand. And all manner of vehicles clog the streets. People on bikes carrying cannisters, chicken coops,or children, one or two people on motorcycles, people scurrying along on foot, in taxis, in vans, in small trucks, large trucks, in parades of concrete grinders, all moving through streets that have no traffic lights and seemingly no traffic rules. It would be a scary place to drive. And it's a scary place in which to be a pedestrian and to try and cross a stret. Even Arnie who likes to challenge everybody on the road agreed about that. Ironically however I noticed that many of the major highway signage, not street signage, but highway signage, was in Chinese and also in English.

Some other random thoughts :

* We often saw Mother's carrying small children wearing pants with a large slit that ran from the crotch up the back. Most Chinese kids don't grow up wearing diapers but instead wear these pants which give them more freedom especially in the chinese toilets which are generally two footpads and a hole in the ground. Kate's reaction when I pointed this out to her was "Yuch" and then I reminded her that when I first picked her up, she too was wearing pants just like that. And yes, of course, I still have pants. And the shirt and her shoes.

* There is tremendous reverence for uniforms and many people in China who deal with the public wear them. Whether it's the same red t-shirt that all the waiters in the dumpling restaurant wear, or the spit n polish uniform of the toll takers, subway workers, airline workers, Museum guides, there is a great love for uniformity. You often see large tour groups,this was especially true on the Great Wall, where everybody wears the same red or orange baseball cap.

* There were 5 families from all over the US on this trip and out of 20 people, 10 were children and 10 were adults. And out of that number, 5 girls had been adopted from China. At the adult table we talked several times about the cirumstances that had brought us together and wondered if the time period from 1993 to 2007 would be considered an aberration in Chinese history. During the last year, China drastically changed the requirements for international adoptions which has made the wait time increase from nine montyhs that I waited to be assigned Kate to up to 3 years. Some of these changes include totally excluding single parents, requiring a hefty minimum income, mandating that adoptive parents not be overweight, or sick, etc. Perhaps these changes were part of a public relations campaign to better position China as an economic powerhouse in preparation for international media attention during the Olympics this summer, and perhaps this reflects the ability for the Chinese to adopt domestically.

I'm just waiting for the historical revisionism to begin.

JULY 4TH

Arrived in Shanghai yesterday afternoon on an early flight from Guilin. By the time we left for the aiport, Arnie was in real pain and unable to walk. We negotiated the flight and the airports in a wheel chair. He stayed in bed all afternoon and wasn't able to go on a evening boat ride in this incredible city of 18 million people. Yikes

This morning we went to a nearby hospital aided by Michael Han, our fearless tour leader, where we had a terrific experience, spending only 1 hour there, and learning that Arnie has a kidney stone. So much for a groin pull. He spent the rest of the day in bed drinking bottles of water and resting. Kate and I went to the Shanghai Museum which was sensational. More stall souvenir shopping in extreme heat persued by the most aggressive peddlers I've ever encountered. Little bit like being Princess Diana fleeing from the paparazzi. I went to buy some tea and had a tea tasting.

We spent some on the roof of our hotel drinking with the other parents on the tour which was a great way to end the trip. We fly out tomorrow!

A day in Liu Zhou

It took us some 2 hours to finally arrive at what had been Kate's orphanage and is now a nursing or old age home in the non descript town of Liu Zhou which means near the forest. OUr guides are always talking about what the government is doing for the people; parks, holidays, gigantic buldings, etc. And in this case it's my idea that the Governmentkis also building 4 lane highways in all these towns and consequently there is some similarity among some of these places. We take the Liu Zhou exit and then start frantically calling to figure out the location of the orphanage/old age home. It's way off the beaten track past several factories, a mountain of refuse and other industrial wastes. This is not going to be the Eureka moment for Kate. The Director has not been available by phone for several days, the head of nursing who comes out to geet us looks to be 12 and is not specially interested in our visit. She tells us that none of the files are available and that all of the staff has scattered. We are invited to take a look at Kate's old quarters but they are now a parking garage amid a sprawl of a pleasant enough interconnecting one story yellow buildings. There are no answers to our carefully crafted list of questions and no possibility of ever seeing the files. Finish

Kate and I dissolved into tears of anger and frustration. But then we drove onj to Kate's finding location which was a local police staion. I hadn't realized that I even had this information until just before we left for China and this was a great find. The police were really nice and seemed interested in our quest for information although they said that all the police had retired 5 years ago. But we were able to take pictures of Kate at the police station.

So much for all that. Then our guide suggested a quick lunch at a local restaurant. We actually went native and stopped at a roadside restaurant where they cooked in an open stall and everybody eats at tiny roadside tables sitting onj small plastic stools. Our guide took one look at the stalls and said, We go to the crowded one because the food will be better. We sat ourside and ate a steaming bowl of noodles in broth spicy with red peppers which were so slippery because I'm not that ept with chop sticks so I was practically wearing my lunch. In the end I had to toss my white shirt and white pants which were freckled with red oil.

This was really a case of food being a restorative and we all felt better about our day. We also felt better once we got back to the hotel and hit the swimming pool.

By this time Arnie seemed to be in increasin pain from a groin pull that was moving around to back.

E

Crunch Time

Today's the day we visit Kate's orphanage in Liuzhuo. This place is so rural, even our guide isn't sure how to get there. A small town, industrial, but said to be pretty. If there's a focal point for our visit to China, this is it. We're all a bit nervous about what we will or will not find. Still, we believe we'll be a stronger family unit when the day is done, for having undertaken this adventure. Wish us luck!

Guilin - River Li

Sue Tsai is our terrific guide here in Guilin and she took us firmly in hand from the moment we stepped off the
plane into incredible humidity. Even before we were allowed to check into our hotel, she took us to a park with large lake that the Chinese who can see animal forms in anything, call Elephant Trunk Hill. It's supposed to look like an elephant's trunk of course but in spite of my lack of imagination it was a great place to really breathe some fresh air and detox from the plane. But at Elephant Trunk Hill I also saw some Cormorants and I was delighted. I remember these birds from reading Ping the Duck as a kid and then it was all reinforced when I read to Kate about the fisherman on the Yangtzee River. The cormorants wear tight rings around their necks so that they can dive for fish but the rings prevent them from actually swallowing.

Yesterday we took a half-day boat trip down the River Li which gently floats you through some incredibly beautiful country with amazing limestone hills which are called Karsts after the explorer who discovered them. We continue to look for the China that we imagined at home but the reality is often very different. Here we did see something of that older China house There is alot of life lived on the river with people bathing, washing clothes and just watching the flotilla of tourist boats. At one point I felt vaguely like Captain Cook putting into shore when two persistent hawkers hooked up their very thin bamboo rafts to the boats offering up buddahs and other souvenir stuff.

After the boat ride we took what they call an electric car with another family we met on the boat into the country and again this was the China that we thought we would see. Very slow pace of life, very hot of course and people squatting in shade. We were all glad to get back into Guilin and head for the swimming pool.

For dinner we negotiated our way through rush hour traffic of green taxis, bikes, motor bikes, private cars, vans, trucks and motorcycles with and without a side car to get to a Szechuan restaurant. Luckily we were dfriven because I would not live long here as a pedestrian.

Dad Gets a Cold

Dad has this terrible cold consisting of a running nose and a cough. Poor dad. Mom said that how miserable dad felt she loved him. I said that no matter how miserable he felt, I loved him and no matter how miserable he was, I loved him too. My mom had this cold too. I almost got it too but it did not affect me the way it affected them. My mom had brought some medicine to China but sinced she had the cold first, she used all the medicine. Now we cannot find the medicine that helped my out so much. We keep on buyung medicine that our guide recommends. Oh well. I feel bad for dad.

The Li River

We had so much fun going down the Li River just outside of Guilin. As we saw beautiful mountains we took lot of pictures of the wonderful scenery. Sue, our personal guide in Guilin, pointed out many different land marks in China along the river. The Chinese have great imaginations because they are always looking for some other meaning of a simple object. They have a mountain with nine horses, painted it seems, on the mountain. Really it is the coloring of the lime stone rock. All the mountains are limestone. They say that Guilin was underwater for some time, and all the mountains were under water. Hard to believe when you see how large the mountains are. There is also a rock that is called something like "The Yearning for Husband Rock." The rock is supposed to look like a woman with a baby on her back and it seems that she is looking for her husband. I did not get it at all. All the rocks had some different colorings in the limestone. I could not see the nine horses either. Oh well.
We met this very nice Indian family on the plane to Guilin. There father sat next to mine and they got to talk to each other. They have a daughter around my age and a son. We saw them on the cruise along the Li River. We got to travel together. We got go down to the water and under the bridge. the rock underneath was very slippery. The little boy almost fell in. I was standing next to him so I immediately grabbed him. Of course it gave everyone a scare because people say that millions of people die in the Li River each year. If he did fall in, I might have gone in after him because the water was so nice and cool, so inviting.
By the end of the day I was ready to swim. The out door pool is wonderful. Mom and I went down and played Marco Polo. Of course my mom cheated like always when she plays Marco Polo. She gets frustrated when she cannot find me. Then we played dunk the other person in the water were I lost. Then suddenly, there was a loud burst of thunder. Then the rain came down in torrents. Sheets and sheets. It all happened so quickly. Soon the life guard said that we had to get out of the pool. I was very dissapointed because I am not going to get a lot of time to swim because the pool opens pretty late. As soon as we got to our the rain stopped and we went back down stairs. I was still very cranky about having to leave the pool for five minutes. That is all for now!