Medical checkup

This morning we walked across the street to get a passport photo of Juliet, then we walked across Shamian Island (about 10 minutes) to the medical clinic to get her checked out. Mercifully, I only have photos of the walk to the clinic:




The clinic itself was full of babies and parents. There were three stations for us to visit: one doctor examined her skin for marks and whatnot; a second tested her reactions (primarily by squeaking a ball and seeing if Juliet tracked its sound); at the third station, some orderlies weighed Juliet and measured her height. The second doctor was blind in one eye and wore a 60s-style focusing mirror over the other, giving her a peculiar Brothers Grimm scary-but-nice-witch look. We also suspect that Juliet's worriesome 4-month head circumference measurements come from the shape of her head, which has its maximum circumference about 1/3 of the way from the top rather than 1/2 way down.

The White Swan in Day and Night

Here are a pair of shots of our hotel, one in daytime (sorry, no sun yet in Guangzhou), and one at night. No Swan Lake jokes, please.

Embroidery for Nana

Joyce asked me to snap pictures of this embroidered screen for her mom, Audrey. The dragons achieve a three-dimensional effect (maybe like embossing for paper) through means unknown to me.

Shanghai food

On our return from the folk arts center, I discovered that Juliet and I share a preference in soft drinks.

Juliet made her delighted squealing noise after resting her gums on the fridge-cold bottom of the can. I'm guessing that the cool helps soothe her teething pains in a way that the plastic toys, even chilled in the fridge, don't.


For dinner, we headed to a Shanghai restaurant that Linda and Joyce had found while wandering Shamian island. Juliet continued to taste everything, including the umbrella shaft and the tip of its curving cane. Yum!

Auntie Celeste, is this enough immunological challenge, or shall we roll her around in the dirt a bit?


At dinner, one of the waitresses turned out to be Juliet's kindred spirit, clapping her hands and squealing "Baby!", and eliciting laughter and delighted squeals from Juliet while we waited in front of the restaurant. Here's a shot of Sandy (the waitress) with Joyce and Juliet. I note with amusement that Sandy's supervisor's name tag had the title of "Caption".



The Shanghainese food was quite good. We had a yummy fried eggplant (kind of crusty coating, with garlic), some xiao lum bao-like pork dumplings that came in a paper holder with broth and a can of sterno, chicken with special spicy sauce, and fried rice (the weakest entree, probably because we couldn't get the seafood version due to Linda's allergy). The chicken with special spicy sauce was served cold, with a wonderful combination of spices that added a bit of tang to the boiled chicken meat. I believe I remember my maternal grandma (Hobu) and her friend (Nabubu) making this chicken for us when we were children. Mom and Aunt Jean, do you know the recipe?

Guandong Folk Arts Museum

For our second excursion on Sunday, we went to the Guandong Folk Arts Museum, which was once the private household of the Chen family, and has been variously called the Chen Clan Academy and the Chen Ancestral Hall. I found its architecture to be comforting, peaceful, and beautiful within the constraints of stone-and-wood architecture; the only thing I could imagine its inhabitants wanting more of was climate control. Here's a shot of one courtyard and part of a roof.


The museum contains a variety of artwork, including paper cutting,


ivory carving,


embroidery (Joyce liked this one for its resemblance to a Dutch Renaissance still-life),


and porcelain (yes, Dad, I know you think it's all Johnny-come-lately junk).



I was particularly taken by the display of how to make a set of concentric ivory spheres (one example at the museum had 43 layers!). Start with a chunk of tusk, make it a sphere, drill conical ports, then scrape sideways out of the ports to free each sphere. Once a sphere is free, one can detail it into an elaborate grillwork. I wonder how much time one of these takes. And I wish I'd thought of this when idling away time at summer camp--the soapstone on Catalina Island would have been perfect for this.


Oh yeah, almost forgot: gratuitous elephants!

Six Banyan Temple

This temple site apparently dates back to the sixteenth century. It's got a pagoda, and this line-up of three Buddhas (my angle only captured two of them), and a bunch of incense burning stations.



My mom will accuse me of being too keqi, but I decided to bow and light some incense in honor of my maternal grandmother (whose 100th birthday would have been a couple of weeks ago) and my Cantonese ancestors, some of whom I suspect would have visited this temple at one point or another. I'm a little bummed that I have no idea who they were, unless Tai Popo came here as a child.



Then we went into the temple and the monk sang a prayer and blessed the three babies. There was a small amount of sprinkling each of us with water from a leaf dipped in a pot, so I'm not entirely sure whether or not we're now Buddhists. Nah, it's only that deivore religion that does the baptism thing.



Then Joyce decided to light some incense in honor of Juliet's biological parents. I cannot imagine what horrible choices they must have faced in giving up such a wonderful child (who they could not even have gotten to know--the report states that Juliet appeared to have been born the day she was found at the Xingye Woman and Children's Hospital). I hope they wanted the best for their child, and trusted that she would somehow end up cared for and loved.

They hunt in pairs

I love this photo of Tara and Maeve, who are way more animated and interested than when we first met them a week ago. IIRC, we shot this just before loading the kids up to go to the six Banyuan temple and the Guandong folk museum on Sunday.

Chronovore!

We now know what category of eater Juliet is: she's clearly a chronovore! Unlike you wafer-thin deivores, or her adoptive paternal line of carnivores, Juliet's favorite food appears to be watches. This morning she exhibited a new skill by taking Joyce's blue watch off of Joyce's wrist. Impressive.

Speaking of new skills, Juliet seems to be developing quite rapidly. She has figured out how to clap in the last few days. She's on deck to be able to crawl--she gets up on hands and knees and shifts front-to-back, but hasn't quite figured out how to move her legs independently, instead she belly flops forward on the bed. I already mentioned the frog kicking (btw, Joyce reports that Juliet is now much more enthusiastic about bathing, perhaps because she enjoyed the pool in Nanning so much). And she's got a new expression of happiness, which is a kind of high-pitched continuous squeal (I originally thought that this was a pre-crying sound, but the circumstances and the smile on her face suggest that it's more an expression of glee). On the way to the Shanghainese restaurant for dinner tonight, she squealed happily most of the way (in between attempts to eat the umbrella, cane first). I can only surmise that the stimuli of new situations and people are having a positive effect on the pathways in her little head. And now I get to watch what the next thing will be. It's like being on the small-miracle-a-day plan.

Daddies are like Daleks

I have to admit that I thought my friend Brannon was a nutter when he described to me the sterilization regime that he uses on his son Ollie's bottle and feeding paraphernalia. He talked about using boiling hot water, and he had all sorts of concerns about sufficiently sterilizing the various things.

So here I am, in my high-end hotel room in Guangzhou, pouring scalding-hot water out of the hotel-supplied hot pot over a sink full of baby bottle parts. And wondering if shampoo has enough soap content and low enough perfume content. Or whether I actually need to scour each surface or whether it's sufficient to kinda mush things around in the hot water from the tap, since I'm going to chase with the aforementioned scalding water afterwards.

In my defense, there isn't a dishwasher built into our hotel room. If there were, believe me, I'd be using it.

The White Swan Hotel

When photos are back on again, I'll upload a couple of photos, first of the liquor and glassware cabinet in our room at the White Swan Hotel, and second of Linda, smiling ear -to-ear across the street from "Linda's E-Gallery", one of the many shops in front of the hotel.

We managed to have the worst meal of our trip so far, at "Lucy's" bar and grill, which serves American food (mostly). Linda had a hamburger; I had "Lucy's special fried noodles", and Joyce ordered a fried rice. 180Y (about US$25) later, we decided to stick with Chinese food for the rest of the trip.

The White Swan is quite a nice hotel, even by US standards. I'd put it on rank with the Ritz Carltons I've seen--vigilantly clean, high-end shopping in the lobby, lots of services, professional and helpful staff. Paul and Christine rented a suite and sound quite impressed with it; I haven't yet been to see it, but they report that the room comes with silk robes to wear. On the other hand, we're also paying US prices--room service with a bowl of congee for Juliet and a plate of French Fries for the adults came to 168Y, which is about US$20.

There seem to be large numbers of adoptive families at the White Swan. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that 80% of the people eating at the breakfast buffet were adoptive families. I wonder whether that's because the adoptive family deal includes breakfast coupons, or whether in fact most of the hotel guests are adoptive families.

The White Swan hotel is located on Shamian Island, literally next door to the American Consulate (convenient, eh?). I'm not yet sure what to make of Shamian Island. On the one hand, everyone speaks English. On the other hand, it seems rather like an American Enclave and Tourist Trap(TM), like Cancun in Mexico, which is more of an outpost of Die Homeland than a part of the country in which it occurs. There are piles of street vendors, and there are many store fronts with various "Chinese" wares inside--silk, paper cuttings, clothing, luggage of unknown provenance, scrollwork, and little fired pottery things. On the gripping hand, I have no doubt that the enclave follows from the consulate and the hotel--it springs from their business activities.

I think I might have preferred to have stayed in a hotel in the working part of Guangzhou and commuted to the consulate, to get more of a sense of how people actually live and work. The Majestic hotel in Nanning had this sort of feel. Even if I didn't understand how the department store could afford such a large staff, I could see people going to work, moving things (on bicycles sometimes), and carrying on as if a real economy were in action. Here I feel like the economy is very artificial and tourist-driven.

!@#$%^&* Networking

My networking problems are now worse: my VPN can't reach the DESCO server, and I can't ping the VPN server address. For that matter, I can't even seem to connect to Yahoo! Messenger. And my IMAP server doesn't seem to be visible. Is this all the Great Firewall of China?

There was a network outage at work on Thursday night, and there's scheduled maintenance now, so it's possible that I've just got bad timing between my free time for posting and middle-of-the-night standard maintenance.

Arrived Guangzhou

We reached Guangzhou and the White Swan Hotel safely today. I'm going to beg off a full post once again (sorry), as I'm sick (cold and conjunctivitis). More tomorrow.

Travel from Nanning to Guangzhou

I'm having trouble uploading images just now (timeouts, probably due to reduced bandwidth or something), so I'll write the text and hopefully get to add images later. Maybe I've used up my upload quota for today. Grrrr.

On the way to the airport, I snapped a picture of a "Sinopec" gas station. I find the name very interesting--clearly there's some sort of contractual collaboration between China and the OPEC countries. I wonder what it is, and whether there's some negotiated monopoly or special rights associated with it.


Maeve broke into a wonderful smile today, the first that I've seen. I'm guessing that she's getting healthy and simultaneously getting used to having two loving, constant parents around her. In any case, I've got a great photo of her smiling wide with her Debra Harry lips at the Nanning aiport.


I've also got a great shot of Paul and Christine cooing over Tara.



From the airport shops, I snagged a couple of photos, one of blue and white (for my dad, Lowell, who will no doubt write all this stuff off as junk), and one of a pair of sculpted elephants.



And from the plane itself, the headliners on the seats have a logo with some wonderful Chinglish: "Derby the world in my finger". I wonder what the authors meant. Also, the Derby logo, if viewed at a 45 degree angle, is exactly that of Star Fleet.

This'll all look better with the actual photos, I assure you.


Heidi had a strange conversation with the Chinese man who sat next to her on the plane. He wins the award for most cluelessly blunt on this trip. First, he asked her: "So, you came to China to buy a baby?" Yikes! What a stunningly horrid question to ask a new mother!

With a little bit of thought, I have concluded that adopting a baby is like buying a baby in exactly the same way that marriage is like prostitution. From a certain misanthropic viewpoint, yes, they are similar economic transations. And anyone who holds such a position has missed out on a core portion of their humanity. I don't think that Heidi's seatmate is a heartless unromantic, however; he's probably just not good at English.

Second, when Juliet looked around the seat and Heidi cooed at her, her seatmate remarked, "Now that's a pretty baby!" I didn't hear the comment, and I'm inclined to agree with the absolute form of the sentiment, and yet Mr. Seatmate would have done better to have said "another cute baby!" A pity I can't smack him upside the head for failing to be a gentleman.

Joyce's and my social worker had a fun story to tell us about adoptive parents: on the adoption trips that she has taken to China, more than 50% of parents pull her aside and say that they love their own child, but they feel sorry for the other couples whose children aren't as cute as their own. I love this story for its presentation of biology working at its best.

Return to the Park in Nanning

Saturday morning, I slept in, and Joyce and Linda took Juliet back to Peoples' Park in Nanning. It turns out that the admission fee was 4 Yuan for all three of them, which is about 50 cents. Maybe we should start charging that much to get into Central Park. There were both a tai chi group and a group practicing with wooden swords. I wonder how much the wooden sword exercise resembles the Forza class offered by our Reebok club back home in NY.

Network delays

Sorry no posting yesterday--I had wierd netxowrk problems. More when we get to Guangzhou later today.

Return to the Pool!

Here are a couple of nice poolside images from Friday afternoon. My mom, Matilda (Dragon Grandma in the comments) asked for a forward-facing shot of Juliet, and this was the best on short notice.

Some of your have mentioned that you've been printing out the low-resolution photos that are part of the blog. Don't forget that I've got the high-rez originals. If you'd like one of them, send me (Cliff) email, and I'll email or cut you a CD when we get back.

Given the timing, this was probably also about when I contracted conjunctivitis. I started noticing my left eye getting itchy at dinner time on Saturday and figured I'd gotten something stuck in my eye. Indeed--my tear duct and the surrounding tissue had swollen up enough to make me look like I had a third eyelid. Happily, part of the packet of prescription medicine that our adoption-specialist pediatrician gave us included Tobradex. Two drops and a night's sleep later, and almost all visible swelling is gone.

Visit to Green Mountain

Thursday's excursion in Nanning took us to the Green Mountain Temple. Here's a shot of Joyce next to the nine-story pagoda, which we climbed to the top of.






This stele is at the base of the pagoda.







And here's a view from the top of the pagoda back at the palace, which fronts on a very nice lake with the obligatory feeding-frenzy carp.

Mmm, crunchy!

Here's Juliet chewing on her number-3 favorite chew toy: daddy's watch!

And here's a photo of her eating her very first book, which was a gift from our friends Gareth and Allison.

We returned to the swimming pool this afternoon. I am absolutely delighted to report that Juliet is an instinctive frog kicker (breathstroke kick), like me and her Auntie Celeste. I discovered this while doing parental-assisted swimming (i.e., tow the kid around with her head out of water) in the kiddie pool. Juliet started kicking when I pulled her forward through the water. She has really great turnout, which bodes well for the breathstroke division of her future swim team.

For dinner, Joyce stayed home because she wasn't especially hungry, so Linda and I returned to the point-and-eat Chinese restaurant that we've frequented for the last three nights. I found a live turtle in the fish tank, pointed at it, was directed to the "braised turtle" menu item, then failed to order the dish. Our friend Anne is a cute-vegetarian: she doesn't eat any animal that is cute. I didn't have the heart (or stomach?) to demand the turtle just then.

However, Linda and I did manage to order the "deep-fried pigeon with tea flavor". Which was delicious, and would have been called a squab by the Chinese restaurant marketing folk back home.

Poisoning Perch in the Park

Today we went to People's Park, which is only about 5 minutes' walk from our hotel. Strangely, even though it's called People's Park, it charges for admission. I think that this is easily justified given the good condition of the grounds, but both "People" and "Park" suggest free to me, and I find this triply ironic in a Communist country. The march of progress will not be stopped!






I'm amazed to report that some of my one year of college Chinese is coming back. I managed to ask a vendor: "Zhei shi cha bu shi?" (Is this tea?) and "Ni you leng de ma?" (Do you have a cold one?) before forgetting that "ba" is eight.




Like all modern Chinese cities I have visited, Nanning has a distinct lack of free-running protein. That is, there are no birds, squirrels, cats, dogs, or any other animals visible anywhere. If you're an animal lover, that leaves only the protected carp in the park to feed. These people were slowly tossing out bread chunks to the carp, who made an orange boil of fish in their struggles to

get at the food. I have some amazing video footage of this process.

One of the concessions in the park is a costume stand, where one can dress in a variety of traditional costumes. Christine and Tara posed for this delightful shot.







These spheres remind me of the barriers around the Times Square subway station. I'm pretty sure the Chinese ones are hand-made while the American ones are built by CNC tools.





Here's a sample of fun signs from around the park.

Mei's birthday party

Today we held the 1-year birthday party for Mei (who I've been mistakenly calling Meihui and who is actually Minhui, which is confusing because our group's nurse's name is Minhua). We gave her presents and got her a cake!

Joyce, Linda, and I were very happy to manage to scrounge enough wrapping paper out of our supplies (which we had for cermonial gifts to officials as part of the adoption process) to be able to wrap our gifts for Mei. Except that we ran out of tape, so Linda's gift ended up wrapped, but hermetically sealed in a Ziploc bag.

We held the party at the Cantonese restaurant next to the hotel to which Joyce, Linda, Juliet, and I have been going for the last few dinners. I have no further data about the price of the meal, because Paul (Tara's dad) sneaked off with the check before any of us noticed. Paul turns out to be more Chinese than he looks.

While Mei's first year of life has ended on a distinctly positive note, I predict that her second year will be worlds better than her first.