What a Long Strange Trip It's Been, pt 13
2006-02-27, 15:30

Finally, I extend the tale! I'm really feeling like I need to finish this, so I don't forget any more than I already have. Plus, I'm working on consolidating all of this into a single web page, the address of which I'll link to here once it's done and presentable, complete with pictures and everything. Thank you, sudden appearance of Google Pages, for the inspiration. Anyway, back to it.

Goodbye, Nanchang; Hello Guangzhou

Our flight time wasn't until mid-afternoon, so we were lucky enough to have a casually-paced morning in preparation for our first of many flights with the baby. We had one last breakfast at the hotel buffet, and one last exposure to the Worst Music to Eat By in the World. I can still hear it, lurking in the back of my head like a musical cancer.

Breakfast during this week had also been the Paranoid Parent Conference arena, wherein the adults would compare and contrast their dilemmas and experiences with their newly adopted against the dilemmas and experiences of the others'. Is yours sleeping through the night? What is she eating? Is she taking to the formula? We were not really participating in the exchange, for the most part. The discussion was understandable, though; for many of the adults, this was their first child, and they were not only learning on the fly how to become parents of an adoptee, they were learning to be parents in general. We were - I think I can speak for H, here - intently focused on our child, wanting to forge a bond as quickly and painlessly as possible. We weren't to the point of doting and fretting; we just wanted to make ourselves present and available to her, because we wanted her to want to have us present and available.

By this point, we'd pretty much left congee and microwaved eggs behind, and she was picking from whatever is was we were eating, so she was getting lots of fruit and veggies and noodles and whatever else we thought her under-trained tummy could handle. She was showing no signs of allergies to anything, and had only gotten sick one single time, from eating a little too much mushroom soup. That was a fun cleanup, I assure you. All in all, though, great signs of a healthy baby who knew that she had some catching up to do.

After sending our luggage off and making a third and fourth check of the room to make sure we weren't forgetting anything (which we did, anyway: we left a freezy teether thingy in the minifridge), we sat in the lobby with the rest of the travel group until the buses arrived to cart us back to Nanchang's airport. We said our goodbyes to James and Evelyn at this point, and everyone made sure to get a picture of the baby with them, us included. Both of them were extremely helpful and we would have been truly lost there without them.

The outgoing area of the airport was just as sparse as the incoming area, with lost of blank white walls. The only difference was the 'gift' area, which was offering up some paltry nick-nacks. H started taking pictures of everything, I think because she suddenly wished that we'd been taking pictures every second while we were in Nanchang for the baby's sake, and that this was it, we were about to leave. She was even taking pictures of the gift shop and the informational signs pointing to things like drinking fountains and bathrooms. "What if the baby wants to know how to say 'drinking water'?" she told me. Little things like that make me love her all the more.

While we were in part glad that we were about to escape the nasty heat of Nanchang, mainly we were sad to go, feeling like we'd barely scratched the surface of the place. I think we both decided to ourselves then that we knew we had to go back there eventually. And we had to bring the kids with us; not just Laurana but the older ones too, so they could experience a little their sister's homeland and see for themselves what an amazing, beautiful, freaky and sad place China is.

Late afternoon, and we were in the plane. We spent what ended up being a little over an hour flight watching the cartoon bird steal sick bags and throw out tampons (see above) and talking with the other families around us. It was a quick and clean flight, and then we found ourselves in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.

Shortly after landing and obtaining our luggage, we met with our new set of guides, 'Richard' and 'James' (a different one). They helped us get situated and mounted up for our hour-long trip from the airport to central Guangzhou. Along the way, Richard explained to us that Southern China is mainly Cantonese-speaking, so he gave us some of the basics to use around town (though they proved mainly unnecessary, as the area of Guangzhou we were in was so touristy and Western-leaning - leftovers from British occupation - that English proved more than enough to get us by) and some of the history of the area.

We rode into the city, and soon enough we were coming upon apartment housing typical of the outskirts of any urban area. And then there were more apartments. And more apartments. And more. Time went by and I started getting the sense of what living in a massively populated area is like. For about 30 minutes along the highway, we could see little but housing. Millions and millions of people. It was a little overwhelming.

The bell rings - more tomorrow, hopefully.

-- End Transmission --