Webcam suggestions?

I'd been meaning to get a webcam for about a month now, but hadn't yet gotten around to it. Do any of you have recommendations or suggestions? I know my coauthor Paolo would say to buy the cheapest $20 device I can find. But do the higher-resolution cameras add any value?

Also, our default webcam service would be Yahoo! Messenger, which my family and Joyce's family both use. If you'd like to see a Juliet webcast, it's probably good to either get an ID or convince Cliff to sign up for your service of choice.

In any case, please either add comments or send Cliff mail.

Thanks.

Memorial Day Weekend

For those of you complaining about the lack of posts this weekend, here's how Juliet and I spent most of it:

I suspect that I picked up some strange new bug on the plane--I had a fever of 101.3 on Sunday morning, which was gone by Sunday noon. I had one of those "brain loose inside my head" headaches that only aspirin can cure for most of that day. Also, all food tasted wierd--like the parameters in the Matrix had been tweaked just a little bit, so chicken didn't taste like chicken anymore. Anyway, the combination of whatever I was fighting and jet lag made me not the most sociable person this weekend--I'm afraid Ralph and Audrey didn't see me at my best.

On Saturday, we spent some time unpacking, some time marvelling at the job Ralph and Audrey had done repainting our kitchen, and some time visiting the new apartment with Ralph, Audrey, and our friend Jocelyn, who came over to meet Juliet. Sorry, no pictures--I was too spaced out to remember to take any. We did, however, put Juliet into the stroller that Beth and Steve loaned us for the trip. Juliet seemed to really like the stroller experience--despite being closer to the ground, I think she enjoyed the ease of being carted around. The Baby Bjorn is probably more work for her, as she's got to be able to feel the muscle motions of whoever is carrying her.

On Sunday, Joyce and Audrey went shopping for baby supplies at the Manhattan Babies 'r' Us. In addition to bringing back the usual sets of things (diapers, bottle liners, etc.), they also came back with a bouncy swing, which Juliet loves.

I think it's improving her coordination. Also, Juliet seems to be crawling for real these days, and its much easier and neater to feed her baby food than it was only a few days ago.

Sunday evening, our friends Beth, Steve, and Annabel; Richard, Susan, Elaina, and Amy all came by to meet Juliet before going out for dinner. Amy unfortunately had an ear infection, so her parents took turns hanging out with her downstairs while the other parent came up to socialize. Annabel brought a whole set of gifts for Juliet, including a hippo that vibrates and sings "Fur Elise", a tetrahedral plastic molecule, some cool cloth cubes that make different noises when you squish them, and a mobile-like device that looks to me like a surrealist nightmare but I am assured is delightful to babies. Again, I'm sorry I didn't get any pictures due to being spaced out.

Nanny and Grampy left to return to Oregon on Monday morning, so we only got to see them for a weekend, which was far too brief. We're hoping to see them again in Maine this summer, with a more relaxed schedule to enjoy each others company.

Our last big triumph of Monday was making congee! My dad (Lowell) provided the very simple recipe: one cup rice, two cups chicken stock or water, meaty bits to taste, and simmer for two hours, adding water to maintain the same consistency as the simmer boils liquid off. We used bits of Citarella rotisserie chicken (our favorite among Upper West Side rotisserie chickens, having tried them all). Juliet appears to approve.

Arrival at Newark

Customs at Newark airport was relatively smooth--we went to a normal "US citizens" line, handed our packet from the US Consulate in Guangzhou to the customs officer (Mr. Ferrari, who was very nice to us), then were escorted downstairs to a secondary area, where, after waiting about three minutes, another customs officer looked us and Juliet over, then handed us back her US passport. She's apparently provisionally a US citizen, although she still has a Chinese passport. There's still one form (N400 or some such) that we get to fill out to complete the process.

When we got out of the customs area, Audrey and Ralph Farnsworth (that is, Nanny and Grampy) were there to meet us!






We spent a little bit of time blundering around Newark Terminal C before realizing that it has no restaurants outside the secured area. So we took the monorail to Terminal B and found ourselves five seats at Chili's. Staring at an American fast-food menu. Joyce and I split a mushroom-swiss burger, which turned out to be just about right. I was very happy that we got to spend time with Linda, Ralph, and Audrey before Linda caught her flight home to Boston.

Have we mentioned that it was wonderful to have Linda along on the trip with us? Of our many wonderful, talented, and delightful friends (and Linda is all three), Linda gets my vote for "most calm". She's also an experienced baby caregiver by virtue of having twin nephews and a niece. All of which added up to a third pair of hands, a lot of sage advice, and a calming presence in panicked moments throughout the trip. Joyce and I thought that the combination of one experienced and two inexperienced caregivers worked out nicely--we could learn on the job and still have backup for the hard situations.

The Flight Home

It was kind of strange telling Juliet that we were taking her "home", since home is halfway around the world and a place she's never visited before. Nonetheless, she held up very bravely on our connection from Guangzhou to Beijing, and from Beijing back to Newark, New Jersey.

Here are some fun shots from the Beijing airport. First, Windows apparently still crashes in Chinese.


Second, the connecting corridor between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 had these wonderful bamboo trees growing along its windows, providing shade. Linda called them a "bamboo curtain", for which we chastisted her, since the Cold War is long over.


These shots are also from the walk from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. Joyce was carrying Juliet in the Baby Bjorn, and with Linda in front, Juliet decided that eating Linda's backpack was the right thing to do.





Linda mentioned in her blog that we hit some impressive turbulence about an hour out of Beijing. I was jolted awake, and one of the overhead compartments sprung open, spraying Joyce and Juliet with orange juice (my guess is that the flight staff were storing the OJ there). It was pretty rough for a few minutes; as rough as I've felt in a commercial aircraft. One thing I don't understand is that the turbulence coincided with the Mongolia-China border, and that as soon as we hit it, we started a long banking turn to starboard that was visible on the trip computers. Did we really hit turbulence, or was it a glitch in the automatic flight control system, making a sudden change to the controls when we switched from one vector to another?

Safely back in New York

And severely jet-lagged. More whenever I wake back up.

The US Consulate

For security reasons, we couldn't take cameras into the US Consulate. My one photo is of the crowd outside the consulate, after everything was done and we were waiting for the buses to take us back to the hotel.

It turns out that the Consulate is no longer next door to the White Swan Hotel. A year ago it moved out into a new development area, to the sixth floor of an anonymous office building. It took us half an hour to drive there by bus. It's not at all clear to me whether the move is due to increased adoption flow, concerns about security (the old consulate was very visible, with obvious American flags; the new one you'd have to know where it was to find it), or both.

Most of the process was waiting, although overall, things were impressively efficient, especially as it appeared to me that at least 50 families were processed today. We waited for the usual security check, which was pretty much like an airport check. Then we sat in a waiting area, showed our kid with a copy of her passport to a clerk to verify that she was in fact present, waited some more, and heard a very gracious and brief speech by one of the consular officials. He noted that Guangzhou is the largest adoption center in the world, that they processed 8,000 adoptions last year and are on their way to far more this year. He also noted that almost all of the adoptees are girls, and that China's demographic trends will make them especially precious in the years to come. And finally, he asked us to "swear or affirm" that all of the written and oral testimony we had given the Consulate was correct. Then that was it--Juliet's Chinese baby passport was returned to us, with a new US immigration visa on one of its pages, along with a sealed envelope to deliver to customs in US.

Tomorrow we fly, first to Beijing, and then to Newark. My understanding is that Juliet becomes a citizen when we touch down on US soil.

Next post in country, insh'allah.

Charlie's Angles they're not

Since it's the last day, we gathered with the other families in our group for the classic "red sofa" photos with our kids.

Here we are setting up.


Tara arrived next.


Given how many takes I had to discard to get this one shot, I can't imagine how kid photographers stay in business.


Juliet makes a shameless grab for attention.


Yay! All three look in the same direction.


Here's all the moms and all the dads with their kids.

Still more capabilities

Today is our last full day in Guangzhou, the day of our visit to the US Consulate.

Juliet began the day by demonstrating a new pose. She's still not quite crawling, but this looks like a pretty good precursor to me.


And here's her reaction to Gerber's apple and chicken.

Dinner for Lin Qing and Minhua

Linda gave me and Joyce the best present we've received this trip: the afternoon off. She took care of Juliet, and we scurried off to shop and rediscover each other. I found it quite a relief--the woman I married, once again paying full attention to me! For a large chunk of the last week and a half, she's been mommy more than my Joyce. It was nice to have her back.

When we returned from shopping, Linda told us that the other two families were taking Lin Qing and Minhua out to dinner at the Silk Road, the French restaurant in the hotel. So we scurried down and met up with them just in time. Here's a couple of photos of the sorbet palate-cleanser between appetizers and entrees, whose presentation was a knockout (see for yourself).



Sorry that the photos are so dark; Joyce disabled the flash to avoid spooking babies. In the first photo, Paul is on the left; Christine is the blur left of the candle, Minhua is the very dark outline right of the candle, and Heidi is on the right (Steve is behind Heidi, and Maeve and Tara are in strollers below the table, so you can't see them). In the second photo, I'm on the left with Juliet, talking (in my fubared Chinese) with Lin Qing.

Over dinner, Lin and I talked a bit; it was nice to get to know her better. She has a nine-year old daughter and lives with her husband in Wuzhao, which is about a five-hour bus ride upriver from Guangzhou. She also hosts an orphan girl with what sounds like a scholarship from Alliance for Children to attend a local college. I fumbled terribly, and eventually failed to explain to Lin that my Aunt Jean is a terrific cook in part because she trained as a chemist. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to explain "chemist" to Lin--the closest I could come was "a person who makes medicines for their job, but not someone who sells them." Which is an indication of how bad my Chinese is, I'm afraid.

More wierd food!

You didn't really think I'd gotten the wierd food pictures out of my system that easily, did you?

First up, we have a fruit store, with a pile of what I think are durian in front. Throughout the last couple of days, I'd been getting whiffs of a noxious rot-like smell, not unlike New York's own unique rotting summer garbage smell. I'd presumed that it came from Guangzhou's sewers, but I was wrong--it actually came from these fruit.

I showed this picture to our facilitator Lin Qing, and she says that this isn't the really evil-smelling fruit. So perhaps I haven't actually found the durian.

Everything is better onna stick:


And lastly, a KFC menu from China!


Joyce and I returned to the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall and bought a tea set that Joyce had admired, then walked back to the eyeglasses market place on Renmin Zhong Lu, where I ended up buying three (3!) pairs of glasses, the most expensive of which was about $55. No pictures of this part of the trip, though, although we passed all of the food while walking.

Juliet, by request

Here's Juliet demonstrating two new skills.


The first is sitting up without support. The day before yesterday, she was tripoding; today she seems to be truly sitting. I find this to be amazingly quick.





The second is not accounting on the abacus, although that would be pretty cool. I'd call this "standing with support". She can do this one-handed, which frees the other hand for assaulting parents.

I don't have photo documentation for the third skill, but Linda reports that Juliet drank a formula bottle by herself. I'm rather proud of this, because only yesterday I was pushing her hands onto the bottle in an attempt to get her to grasp it (instead of flailing around during bottle-feeding).

Voyage to the Antiquities Market

Because there was no organized touring today, this afternoon we took taxis to the Antiquities Market. Or at least that's where we thought we were going. To make things easier for foreigners, the hotel provides cards with "please take me to..." and a list of checkboxes of interesting places, which one can show to taxi drivers. Our drivers certainly delivered us to Zhangshan road, but it turned out that we landed a couple of blocks away from the antiquities market, instead starting in some sort of modern jade exchange. We wandered the jade exchange for a while, then negotiated in broken English and fubared Chinese for directions to the antiquities market (as far as I could tell from the very patient policeman with whom I spoke, we needed to walk north to the "5", although whether this was 5 minutes, 5 buildings, 5 blocks, a statue of a 5 on the street, I couldn't tell).

On the taxi ride, we saw this apartment complex, which reminds me of some of Gaudi's apartment buildings in Barcelona. I don't think that the Chinese architect even knew of Gaudi, but I'm intrigued by the similarity of style.



At the antiquities market, I couldn't handle the cigarette-fouled, uncirculated air and ended up waiting outside. Joyce and Linda and I decided to make for an area that the hotel staff had referred to as the "eyeglasses market" on Renmin Zhong Lu (People's Middle Road). I rather enjoyed this walk, as it involved navigating a map with Chinese street names on it (not impossible, as one can match characters on the map and on the street signs). We eventually found the eyeglass area, which is a clump of eyeglass shops, some facing the street, but most housed within two buildings. It's rather like the diamond district in New York, or many of the other such specialized blocks in NYC, where some nifty network economic effect makes it better for all of the suppliers of a particular good to be within yelling distance of each other. I wish we had such a street in New York, instead of having (a) Lenscrafters, (b) Morgenthal-Friedrichs and (c) wierd, overpriced boutiques. Joyce and Linda bought matched sets of reading glasses. I saw a couple of fun frames; maybe I'll go back tomorrow after I've read my prescription off my contact lens cases.

While we were waiting for our glasses to be ground, we went to the "Kung Fu" fast food restaurant. It has Bruce Lee for its spokesperson. The rice was yummy, the soup had large chunks of unknown meat in it but had great broth, the broccoli was tasty, and the eel and pork that I ordered were quite good. Everything was of course greasy.

The last of the forms?

This morning's excursion took us to Minhua's windowless fifth-floor hotel room. The fifth floor is where guides, nurses, and facilitators stay. I suspect that it's windowless because the hotel facilities extend to the fourth floor, and there's probably physical plant like AC equipment on the roof of the fourth floor, blocking any usable view on the fifth. We were in Minhua's hotel room to fill out the US-side adoption forms. It took us two hours to fill out the forms and walk through our checklist for the packet to be submitted to the US Consulate, which Minhua will do for us tomorrow. No pictures, which is probably a mercy.

Cantonese food

We went across the street to a Cantonese restaurant named something like "D. K. Company" today. I got to introduce Linda to Chrysanthemum tea, which she liked so much that she started interrogating me about other good flavors of Eastern tea (er, um, Oolong, and, er, um, Lapsang Souchong--that tastes like cigarettes. No really, it's good!). Linda selected the Golden Chrysanthemum tea, which came with continuous tea delivery service. Rather than just bringing us a pot of tea, the waitstaff kept a small "gravy boat" of tea on the table, vigilantly refilling our cups and the gravy boat. We never saw any chrysanthemum petals, so I have to believe that they kept a pot and a filter in some back room.

Here's a picture of our meal, which I voted best meal of the trip so far (Linda agreed on quality, but thought that Maeve's birthday party back in Nanning was better for the variety afforded by seven adults worth of food). On the left are the Cantonese boiled peanuts (including, I think, sugar, vinegar, and a clove). Front and center is the sliced spiced goose. Back center is the broccoli in garlic. On the right there's Macau style roast pig, with a plum dipping sauce and a crispy, fried-fat skin.


Most of the clientelle of the restaurant was Chinese, rather than adoptive families, despite its location across the street from the White Swan. I have to believe that the display of yummy live seafood at the entrance serves as a bok gwai deterrent. Here's a sample of my favorites.

"Young Fish" and "Silkworm":


"Pearl Oyster" and some sort of squid:


"Sandworm" and "Water Beetle":


A really big lobster (Joyce's hand is above the tank, about a foot above the lobster, and the camera is only three feet from the tank):


Turtles:


Eels:


Water snails:


Geoduck clams:


Some unknown thing (sea cucumber?) and sea urchin (uni):


Flounder:


and lastly, Conch shells:


Now we know where all the protein is--it's in storage tanks in restaurants!