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.