Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Fengcheng Hospital/Marina's abandonment site

Wed Jan 19th.

Wed Jan 19th.

Well M’s asleep and Rhea is off getting a foot massage with her friend Barry. Life is rough here in the China hotel. I should clean up but some things are hopeless. I guess I’ll just stick with my usual system of open suitcase throw everything in and look carefully under the bed. The foot massages are great fun. R and I have had 2 they’re only 10$US and its really nice. They give you a shiatsu type back rub while you soak your feet in a wooden bucket of hot tea and then you have a foot massage. It’s 60 min of heaven. Though they tend to giggle a lot since R is so small. R loves it though. I think we’re trouble with that one. I can see her now as a teen. “Dad, I don’t want to go to the cabin. I want to go to a Spa.” Yikes!

Ok back to FC:

Basically, as I said FC was what I would call ‘real china’ modern but in a early industrial sense.

For our itinerary we basically traveled around to each baby’s abandonment site. Ours was first The People’s Hospital of FC. We got out looked around and took a few pictures. I thought is might be an ‘emotional’ but it wasn’t really it was just a place. Maybe someday for M it will be an emotional spot but it just was what it was. A place where one of the 1000’s of Chinese girls was abandoned. Obviously, if this was the spot, it was a place where she was intended to be found.

After that we made our way thru the city and stopped at the Agricultual planning office and the Civil affairs office. Along the way we stopped at this stand where we bought some Rice cakes, apearantly FC is renound for these sweet rice cakes. We bought a bag. They were good. M obviously had had them before she grabbed it and knew what to do.

As I said before people were very curious about us and our babies. Unfortuately, we don’t speak Chinese, since people kept asking us questions about M. All we knew how to say was “je je” which is big sister and “me me” little sister. They seemed to understand and thought that was great. But as they pointed out our noses were too big for us to be related.

Well after our whirlwind trip to FC we headed back to NC. By the time we got back I started to feel a little bad. We got back to the hotel at about 6:15 and immediately jumped on the next bus to go out to a culmination dinner. Unfortuately, once I got there I realized I was sick. After a quick trip to the bathroom to throw up we took a taxi back to the hotel. The night was grim. I’ll spare you the details but let me just say that whatever it was I ate my body made every effort necessary to get rid of. Yuck!

The next day I felt “better” but was weak. It was packing day so we packed up and headed to the airport. We left at 2:00is only to arrive and find out our flight was delayed and continued to be for 5+ hrs. Luckily I wasn’t hungry because there wasn’t much to find there. Thank goodness we brought some balance bars. We finally arrived at the hotel in GZ at around midnight. Boy it felt good to be back.

Hopefully That’ll give you a little idea of Fengcheng. If you go to the site where the pictures are stored. You can see some of the shots I took. Just click on a picture and you’ll be taken to Flickr and from the enlargement of the pic from the blog you can select to look at others as well. I’m going to try to go thru and edit in some descriptions soon.

I guess I'm finally caught up. Now I can start writing about things that happened yesterday or today as opposed to last week. Of cours tomarrow is our last full day. So much has happened and we've been so busy I feel like I have hardly scrached the surface about all we've seen and experienced, let alone feel. However, with 2 kids in a hotel in China I don't have the luxury of the time to examine and discribe it all. I hope I'm managing to get across the gist. It's certainly been a great adventure and Marina is a sweetie.

Steve

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