What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, pt 15
2006-09-27, 16:22

Sorry it's been so long since I added to this tale. (Here - click - is the last episode.) I'll just jump right into it.

The other main part of our first full day in Guangzhou was Picture Day, where we get our babies all dolled up for the famous Picture on the Red Couch, which I understand is a White Swan/adoption tradition. We got a group shot of all the families together - which was no small order, considering that there were fifteen altogether and only two I think that had only one parent present, so it was a full picture. Then we did a balancing act akin to spinning plates, where we took pictures of the babies that roomed together in the orphanage, basically in groups of five, all precariously balanced on their undernourished butts and wondering what the heck was going on. We managed not to have any screaming breakdowns or dangerous tumbles. A couple of the dads, playing Stupid American, got chastised by the staff for standing on one of the nearby tables to get a better shot. That would have been rude even in America, but really - do you want to risk getting kicked out of the hotel while you still have a week left on the other side of the planet with a newly adopted baby in tow? Granted, it's hard to think clearly after two full weeks of New Parent stress, but still, standing on the furniture is pretty dang unclassy.

Something Like a Check-Up

Next morning, all the families bundled up our babies and took a ten-minute walk to a local medical facility, which, more than anything (especially considering the close proximity to the White Swan) seemed like a Baby Processing Center. It was a rudimentary check up, consisting of a hearing and sight check, vitals, height and weight and a check for obvious, outward signs of any illnesses. Not that the people there didn't know what they were doing, but so little was administered that it really seemed like a waste of time, but necessary for the adoption process to get a sign off that the baby was, for all intents and purposes, okay.

We spent the rest of the day doing some gift shopping, including buying a new hard-bodied suitcase to carry it all in. That was part of the plan, as recommended by previous travelers we'd gotten information from on some Yahoo groups; so many things there were so cheap that it was just easier to buy them there rather than bring them with you. We managed to find a nice, fairly well built, hard shell red case for about thirty dollars, something that would have easily gone for over one hundred back home. So we had an instant gift carrier for the way back. And it didn't even fall apart as soon as we got it home; we're still using it now.

We shopped for baby gifts for people we knew were expecting; we ordered custom-made outfits for The Boy and The Girl (which was more of a challenge that we thought it should have been, but all their measures were in metric, and an of brand of metric at that, so we had to guess our way through getting the dimensions for The Girl right; luckily one of the girls working at the shop had a similar build and we managed to get something made that actually fit her); we bought squeaky shoes for the baby (we should have bought so many more at the three dollars a pair they were going for - oh well); we ordered a picture we took to be rendered on a small plate of granite, chiseled by hand (see photo example). I have no idea how they were able to be so precise. There were two levels of rendering you could get: the cheaper, less accurate, more painting-style version, or the more expensive version that was basically photorealistic. We chose the simpler version because it took less time and the picture wasn't all that detailed to begin with.

I also found something for myself that I couldn't pass on - a five-dollar Chairman Mao watch, his arm waving in motion with the watch to an image of the People. Classic.

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