Saturday, January 18, 2014
Travel Day
We are currently in hour 24 of our 34 hour travel day. Everything has gone very smoothly. We are now at LAX, killing 4 hours before our red eye flight to New York. A wireless internet connection strong enough to smoothly stream Ternage Mutant Ninja Turtles is making time fly for some of us.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Days of the week
Danny took a break from his regularly-scheduled episode of Donald Duck to once again talk to me about the days of the week and what's going on this week.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Consulate Appointment and Circus
Yesterday, we had our US Consulate appointment. The US Consate in Guangzhou processes all the visas for newly adopted Chinese kids and this appointment is the sole reason that I have been in Guangzhou for the past week. This consulate also processes visa applications for Chinese citizens who wish to visit America - a very lengthy process which involves in-person interviews, verification of financial means, employment, etc.
We got to the consulate at 8 am for my 8:30 appointment. Only those with an appointment can enter the facility, so my adoption agency representative who drove me to the appointment explained in great detail everything that I would need to do in his absence. First, there is a block long, 10-deep collection of people trying to get to the area where you wait to go through the security line. American Citizens have their own line at security - we could see it across a gated off plaza. No one was in that line. The agency rep was excited about this. He said that I needed to get myself to that spot. I should locate the point in the barricade where people were allowed in and then push through all the Chinese people so the guard will see me and wave me through. To draw moe attention to myself, I should should hold my US passport high in the air, wave it and yell "American Citizen" so that the baracade guard would see me and let me in.
People trying to get their place in the visa line are more persistent (and harder to push through) than those in a packed subway car. The people near the front of the mob were also waving papers at the guard and yelling. In the end, my subway experience along with my citizenship, served me well and Danny and I made it through. I was indeed the first person in the honkie security line and then also got the first number of the day in the special "I'm an American" DMV-style waiting area inside the office. About 10 other families had the same appointment time. After everyone arrived, a state department employee gave us an explanation of the process and had all the parents in the room take an oath that their paperwork was accurate. They called my number, reviewed my paperwork, took my fingerprints as an electronic signature, asked me again if everything was accurate, and we were on our way. Essentially, the objective was to drop off Danny's Chinese passport to get his US visa affixed to it as well as to get a sealed brown envelope that I will then give to immigration at the airport in the US. I will get Danny's passport and the brown envelope this afternoon.
With that behind us, we went back to our hotel and relaxed for awhile. We ventured out again in the late afternoon. We got something to eat and the bought some walking-around snacks. Then, we took the subway to the outskirts of town to go see the circus. We were in our seats and ready half an hour before the 7:30 show time because I had read that you need to be there that early to get a good seat. It seemed that this was quite unnecessary because the seats were only 20% occupied.
It turns out that our early arrival was indeed necessary. At about 7:05, the arena started to get louder and louder and hoards of identically dressed school children (navy track suit with white side-stripes and a school crest on the jacket) started pouring in. Each group was following an adult leader/teacher who was holding a paddle with a number on it in one hand and waving a 3 ft long, 2 inch diameter glow stick in the other hand. There were at least 25 leaders and each group had at least 50 kids. One group of kids enthusiastically stared to pack in around us. As many of the passed me, they said "hello", "hello lady" or "Nice to meet you". They also used these phrases later on circus cast members (many of whom were not Asian) that came close to our section. As the only white person in the arena audience, perhaps they mistook me as being part of the show.
The circus show was quite good. It was kind of a mixture between Cirque du Soleil and Ringling Brothers. There were elephants, horses, pigs, flamingos, some sort of horned deer, clowns and show girls. The acts included trapeze, diving and trampoline, guys in body suits trimmed with neon lights doing flips on bungee cords about 30 feet over the audience seating, horse riding acrobats, guys riding little motor scooters in a big spherical cage and a girl who was shot out of a cannon. There was also multiple segments of "aerial ballet" with music, nice lighting and sometime water, snow or fire shooting from various directions.
Proceeding over all of this was, well, I guess the "queen" of the circus. She was dressed like a circus version of Victorian royalty. Sometime she just was escorted on stage between acts, but sometimes she traveled in a giant oyster shell with her entourage which consisted of 2 guys, a lion and a white tiger.
Not sure about the quality of the video links as I'm doing everything fr my phone. They looked ok when they were tiny and before I uploaded them to Youtube.
Aerial Ballet
Animal parade - directly in front of our seats
Acrobats
We reversed our journey back to the hotel and arrived back on our neighborhood around 10:30 pm. This is by far the latest that I have been out, and I learned a couple of things. First, the subways are just as busy at 10 pm as they are at 6 pm. Also, some time between 9 and 10:30 pm, most of the brick-and-mortar stores close a and the streets become filled with food carts and people selling stuff. Many of the vendors have a single garment rack with he any duty wheels. Each rack has a single price and usually a single item ( like pajama pants, vests or sweaters). I assume that the arrival of the street stores must coincide with the end of scheduled bus routes because the vendors didn't seem to be mobile enough to react to the honking buses that marshal the pedestrian use of the streets during the day.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Safari Park Day
South of Guangzhou the is a really nice zoo. We spent the day there. I was quite impressed with how beautiful and spacious it was. There are two sections - one is like a vey large traditional zoo and the other is an open area that you can take a tram through or pay to drive your own car through. It must cost quite a bit to drive your own car because I didn't see that many cars and most of them were luxury vehicles. I suppose there's some bragging right associated with weaving your Land Rover through the giraffes, zebras and gazelle on the roadway.
They also have really large "Jurrasic" section with life-sized animated dinosaurs in the jungle. They were very life-like. I explained to Danny at the beginning (and in the middle) that the dinosaurs were "not real", "fake", "pretend" and "like a movie", hoping that one of those concepts would translate accurately. Multiple times, he would stop short when he heard a dinosaur noise in the jungle. I would attempt to walk forward and reassure him that it was ok, but he would stand in front of me with both hands out to stop me. He then waited for someone behind us to go first before we proceeded. I'm not sure if he feels that I have very poor judgement and we will both be better off letting someone else decide if it's safe OR if he's trying to protect us by sacrificing some strangers.
I ended the day with a visit to Lost and Found because we misplaced Danny's jacket. I went to the desk and told them I was looking for a black jacket with white spots and deer on the front of it. This kind of jacket isn't exactly on style here. I haven't seen anything similar. It came from the orphange.
After a phone call, I was told that it was at the other lost and found on the other side of the zoo. I took the shuttle bus there and when I got there, I told them what I was looking for and they asked me to fill out a form. I then waited for 5 minutes. The workers then produced the jacket from under the counter that stood between us. They then asked me to have Danny put it on to see if it fit. It did. They then told me that I needed to wait to speak to a manager. I pointed out that I described the jacket sight-unseen. They were not satisfied. I them offered to show her a picture on my phone of Danny wearing the jacket. See below.
This also was not quite enough to satisfy them. They wanted to take a picture of Danny holding the jacket and holding my phone which was displaying the picture of him wearing the jacket. Before they could figure out the logistics for this picture the manager came and told me I could take my jacket. Wow. There must be some of lost and found crime ring that they are trying to thwart. I'm glad I had that picture.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Out and about
First we walked to the subway station (see link above for video). The subway station was significantly more congested than the "sidewalks" of the street we walked on to get there.
I was well-armed with all the station names, subway lines and number of stops needed for our trip to another part of town where many adoptive parents stay, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that everything related to the subway (ticket machines, signs, announcements and electronic maps in the subway cars) were all given in English as well as Chinese characters and pinyin (Chinese spelled out in roman letters). Announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. With all this information available, I always knew exactly where I was and that only left the challenge of being able to enter and exit the subway when I wanted to among the crushing crowds of people.
Danny has a thorough appreciation of my Western tendencies to queue in a line and to expect that if I am standing at the front of a line that my turn will be next. He knows that I've got this all wrong and does his best to make sure I'm aggressive enough to actually get our turn. On the subway, I tell him "this one" as we start to pull in to our stop. He then waits until the train slow, grabs my hand and maneuvers us through a solid wall of people. I'm pretty sure this kid has never taken public transportation but he's got a knack for getting himself where he needs to be. I'm going to hold off on any explanation of queuing and politely waiting your turn until we get home because his skills are serving us really well here.
We traveled to the Central Business district which was quite sterile and modern compared to our area of town. There are a number of restaurants and high-end stores there. We opted to go to Trustmart which is what Walmart is called in China. It was spread out over two floors and had most of the same categories of items as Walmart. It did not look at all like a Walmart. It reminded my a lot of a Ben Franklin or Woolworth's.
We walked around for a while and then took the subway back to our hotel. The trip back at 5 pm was more crowded than our earlier trip but by that time we were old pro's.
Here's another
view of our neighborhood from our hotel room. On some of the main streets, the buildings have very modern facades but the buildings themselves are ver simply constructed out of concrete block and tin or wooden roofs.
Friday, January 10, 2014
A trip to the store
Danny's picks from the supermarket: giant grapefruit, tiny oranges, yogurt drinks, rolls, box of unknown item, big bag of dried yet plump round objects (cherries? tomatoes? Peppers? Dates?) that he was very excited about and a whole smoked fish, sliced for our convenience. Mama doesn't speak Mandarin
Scott, Kai and Eva are on their way back to Cambodia for a few days before flying home. Danny and I have arrived safely in Guangzhou where we will be hanging out for the next 8 days.
Up until now, Danny hasn't said more than a few sentences at a time and almost always spoke in a whisper except when he was playing with Eva and Kai. All that seemed to change today. Perhaps surviving his first airplane trip (which he had to live through with only very minimal explanation of what was going on)has emboldened him. Today, he gave me a 5 minute dissertation on lions. It was very detailed and passionate and seemed to talk about some differences between mother and father lions, the babies, lions' sharp claws and teeth, and possibly a couple of different lion attacks on people. This was followed by a 5 minute one-sided discussion about the skyline of Guangzhou and everything going on outside our hotel window. I tried to participate with a number of ohh's, hmm's and head nods. I also threw down all the relative Mandarin I could come up with - primarly "here", "there", "this", "that", "big", "small" and "blue". I also managed to work in a couple of numbers.
Danny asked me to go for a walk, so we are off to explore a bit. I imagine that he wants to walk around while he tries to sort through why he got the parents that are clearly incapable of basic conversational language and have a distinct inability to find food that is spicy enough for his palate.
And... as I am finishing this up, I'm pretty sure he's trying to teach me the names of the days of the week. Maybe there's a little bit of hope for me yet!
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Panda Day
Red pandas don't really look at all like pandas and don't appear to act like them either, but they have the same diet and habitat.
Monday, January 06, 2014
Adoption Day
We will go back to the Civil Affairs office today to finalize the Chinese side of our adoption. We are having a good day. 
Meet Danny!
Great day in the Smith house. We met our new son today. He is gonna fit right in. And bonus! He is a Bears Fan.
Sunday, January 05, 2014
One day to go!
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