Our Last Full Day in China

Our Last Full Day in China

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been home for over a week now. On the one hand, it seems like a very long time since we left China, but we’re also totally still adjusting to life all together as a family. Sorry I’ve been so slow to finish blogging about our trip. It’s been very busy, we’ve been trying to figure out this jetlag thing and, to top it off, my laptop died over the weekend.

Our last full day in China featured two activities: Shopping and a trip to the US Embassy’s visa office. In the morning, we returned to Shamian Island for bargain hunting. There were several small gift items we had in mind and did a halfway decent job of tracking them down.

I was especially interested in watching the finger painters working on the street. By finger painters, I don’t mean little kids messing around with water colors. The finger painter would dip the side of his hand into some black ink spread on a paper plate, or perhaps just the side of his pinkie or a fingernail (his pinkie fingernail was especially long) and then use that ink to create a painting on a small piece of paper. Ink on his finger applied “just so” created a bamboo branch. Ink on his palm might form fog-covered mountains. Ink on his fingernail could become individual bricks on a bridge over a river with a small junk floating in the foreground. And the artists worked so fast!

While we were in the area, Laura and Jeannette returned to The White Swan Hotel and managed to get a few photos of MJ on the famous "red couch," where many groups of adopted babies have their pictures taken.

As soon as we got back to the hotel, Paul Lyman, his father-in-law Dan and I jumped in a cab and headed to the electronics mall in Guangzhou. They had visited there the day before and so I coerced them into a second trip. What an amazing place! They said that there were three buildings of little stores selling nothing but electronics . . . I wouldn’t know, we only had an hour and didn’t even see one entire floor. I won’t detail the things we bought since it might mess up someone’s Christmas surprises but let it suffice to say that there were some great deals to be had. US brand names, it appeared, were not necessarily priced any better than what you might find here in this country after doing some careful shopping but the Chinese brands were often dirt cheap.

I stopped at one booth (some of the businesses were nothing more than display cases mounted in the walls of the hallways) and asked how much their thumb (or flash) drives were. Immediately, the salesgirl asked if I wanted knock-offs and opened a drawer. They were selling 8 GB fake Sony thumb drives for 120 yuan, or $15! After some fairly speedy negotiations—made more complicated by the language barrier—the price ended up at $10. Eight gigabytes! Now, when I got home, I did discover that at least one of the “8 GB” drives I’d purchased was only 4 gig but, still, that’s a pretty good deal.

[Editorial Note upon returning home: Turns out at these wonderful bargains were total junk. At best, one of the thumb drives actually worked for more than a week or so and most of them didn't work at all. Of the two cheap MP3 players I bought, only one worked. Sigh.]

At another place, I checked out some MP3 players and found one that had the most phenomenal sound I’d ever heard. Not to mention that it was extremely cool to look at. Paul, Dan and I stood there and negotiated on buying several of them. We didn’t get the price cut down by much, perhaps 10%, but we were ready to buy. And then I looked in my wallet and discovered that I didn’t have enough yuan to buy even one of them, let alone two! Paul was the only one who had enough cash on hand to complete the purchase. Sheesh!

I was so busy bargain hunting that time rapidly crept up on us. We had to be back at the hotel at 3:00 sharp to leave for the embassy offices. Missing this appointment might mean not leaving China or not getting to keep MelodyJoy. This was perhaps the “highest stakes” appointment of our trip and, as has been documented earlier, being on time is not always a strength for us. We finally grabbed a taxi at about 2:40 and it wasn’t a short drive back to the hotel. To make a long story short, we pulled up to the hotel at 3:00 on the dot as everyone was boarding the busses.

(By the way, the fare for this taxi ride, the longest of our ten days in Guangzhou, was about 30 yuan . . . less than $4. In most US cities, doesn’t it cost four bucks just to start the meter?)

When we got to the embassy building, we all went through security and then sat in a large waiting room. There were perhaps sixty other families there so, needless to say, it was pretty darn noisy in there. Our guides had us come to the counter each in turn and they submitted our paperwork for the babies’ visas. After awhile, one of the embassy employees managed to get our attention and we all gathered in a mob around her while she led us in an oath to the United States on behalf of our soon-to-be not-Chinese-citizens.

We also each received the fabled “brown envelope” with dire instructions to never, never, never open or lose the envelope. Opening or losing it prior to presenting it to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) at our port of entry to the US would mean a quick trip right back to China.

Our final dinner in China was at the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and was perhaps the best one of our trip, partly because it was the only time we ate a dinner twice in the same restaurant and we had started to figure out which dishes we liked.

Afterwards, I ran to the little collection of shops next door, determined to spend the last of our yuan. Did a pretty good job, too (though I later discovered that Jeannette had a wad of yuan in one of her pockets), buying a decorative theatrical mask for Phillip, a bracelet made of jade turtles for Jameson, a red necktie for $1.25 and a snuff bottle. Throughout Beijing and Guangzhou, it was easy to find these small glass bottles, each with a different scene painted on the inside using a small, curved brush inserted through the neck of the bottle. I had been planning all along to buy some of these for gifts. At this store, they offered to write someone’s name inside the bottle so I had them write Nan Cai Jing in Chinese characters next to the painting, for a gift to MelodyJoy. For a price, you could actually get a person’s picture painted inside one of the bottles and I wonder if we’ll regret not doing something like that while in Guangzhou.

After packing our bags for pick-up—Jeannette did most of the work of getting everything stuffed into the suitcases—we turned in for a short night, knowing we would have to leave for the airport at 5:45 in the morning.