I thought at first she had just gotten bruised, as had I, from the beds. This was a wonderful hotel, but the beds were so hard that they leave bruises if you aren’t well padded. I’m well padded, just not everywhere I needed it to sleep on these beds! The beds were literally plywood boxes on top of which a pad had been placed for cushioning. It doesn’t work. You’re still sleeping on a plywood box. No mattress.
But it wasn’t that. Sherpa had stomach cramps. Really bad ones. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong, since we’d both been very careful not to drink water, not to eat any foods that had been washed in water, etc. It was only later that we figured out from the way her stomach was burning that it must have been the peppers in the beef dish, which Jen has now started referring to as Satan’s Daggers of Pain. They never affected me, but she really had a major disagreement with them. She was miserable for several hours and hence awake most of the night. She was so upset about feeling bad, and I was just feeling bad that she was so upset. A couple of hours before daybreak she finally fell into a deep sleep, and was feeling better, albeit weak, by the time morning came. I made the executive decision that she would stay at the hotel and get some more rest and regain her strength while I spent the morning finalizing the adoption. A taxi on a busy street in China is not the place you want to be when stomach cramps hit, and the Civil Affairs office, as we already knew, was bone cold. Simply no reason on earth to expose her to that. She had a fit, saying she felt guilty at not being there to take photos, but I had to put my foot down on that one—it’s just a couple of boring hours of paperwork, and if there were any photo opps, I could get the folks from the orphanage or the guide to hold the camera. Having already been through an international adoption herself, she knew I was right, so she acquiesced and sank back into bed. (Was that relief I saw on her face?)
So Charlie and I packed a tote bag with the camera, some juice, and his ASL dictionary (I asked if he wanted his Harry Potter book, but he’d rather study) and we headed off to the Civil Affairs office with Dragon Lady. She was rather nice today, actually. We got through all the paperwork without a hitch, handed over the gifts, and got in another cab to head back to the hotel. We dropped Dragon Lady off at the notarial office in town, and she gave the cab driver instructions to take us back to the hotel, which he did.
As best as we can figure it in hindsight, having ruled out every other possibility, I must have left that bag, which was black, on the black vinyl flooring in the back seat of the cab where Charlie and I were sitting. Our real guide, Lily, spent a lot of time helping us try to track it down. She called the cab company and tracked the cab (the receipt the cabbie gives you shows the time you were in the cab, the car number, and how much you were charged). The cabbie said when we got out of the cab, the porter at the hotel who opened the door for us even put his head inside the cab to make sure we had everything and didn’t see anything left behind. But a black bag on a black floor just wouldn’t have shown up that well. It wasn’t at the Civil Affairs office, because Lily took us back there to check. The office we were in had been locked since we left, and I checked where the bag had been sitting while we were there. So it had to have been in the cab. I suspect that the next customer in the cab saw a bag with a nice camera in it, and simply picked it up when leaving the cab as though it were his/her own.
I was just sick. There went my camera along with all my gotcha day and adoption day pictures. And there went the ASL dictionary that Charlie had already written a lot of Chinese words into.
But at that point, there was nothing more I could do. I explained to Charlie that I would get him another dictionary once we got to the US, and I kissed the camera goodbye. The folks from the orphanage had taken a couple of pictures, too, so hopefully they can send me copies of what they took so I’ll at least have those. And Jen still has the videocam film, so I’m hoping that we can figure out how to pull those clips onto the computer, because she actually got film of Charlie saying Mama to me for the first time. So it wasn’t a total loss. Maybe I can even figure out how to pull stills off of the video film? Don’t know.
Sherpa, of course, had an absolute fit. Full-blown guilt trip, moaning and wailing and rending clothes, claiming that if sherpa had been on duty, this wouldn't have happened. Oh, for heaven's sake. Now I've got to calm down a guilt-stricken sherpa, too, and convince her it was my own damned fault for being so scatter-brained. I'm just not safe to be allowed out on my own. Which was her point exactly.
The stroke of luck was that I had bought Charlie an inexpensive digital camera before I left the states. So I explained to him that for the rest of the trip, Mama needed to use his camera, but that he could take some pictures, too. We picked up a memory card for the camera, and we were ready to go again.
Highlight of the day was Charlie playing with the remote control cars. I had a huge bag of Matchbox cars for the kids at the orphanage, and he dug out a bunch of those and set up an obstacle course and tried to maneuver the remote control cars around them without crashing into them. Actually, either he didn’t do a very good job, or he wanted them to crash, because he kept knocking them over. His laughter is simply priceless. I love the sound of deaf children laughing (I hear a lot of that at the summer camp that I’m a counselor for.) Because they can’t hear their own voices, their laughter is loud and uninhibited. They just haven’t learned to tone it down to a civilized level. He just had a blast.
Another highlight today was teaching him to play Connect Four and Uno. On the Connect Four, he got the hang of it real quick. After I beat him once in each direction, he made sure not to let that particular strategy happen again. Then I hit him with a double setup, where no matter which way he moved, I had him. I never won another game after that. The little brat started setting me up. I can’t wait to let him take on Rick. I finally gave up and let him whip Jen’s butt for a while. More laughter. Uno was fun, too. He was pretty focused on just the color for a while (we were using it as a tool to learn signs for different colors and numbers) and it took him a few shifts to catch on that the numbers could change the color, but once he got it, he turned into a card shark before my very eyes. Thank God I don’t know how to play poker. I’d probably lose my shirt. I’ll let Rick teach him that.
We did some shopping at Wal-Mart that afternoon, since sherpa was fully recovered by then. We picked up sodas and bottled water and got Charlie stuff like hat and gloves, pajamas, long johns, etc. It was cold enough here in Nanjing, and it looked like Beijing was about 10 or 20 degrees colder, so we wanted to be ready.
Lily placed our wake-up call so that we would get up in time in the morning to be ready to leave for the orphanage. It would be a 5-hour drive, so we had to leave really early.
We had dinner at the hotel that night just for convenience sake, since I had a really bad headache by then. That turned out not to help much, though, because the restaurant was very smoky and the stuff on the menu was mostly things that we westerners don’t like to think about eating. But at least there were no Satan’s Daggers of Pain on the menu. We ended up just ordering noodles and a few dumplings and fried rice, and then saw someone with a plate of watermelon, which wasn’t on the menu, so we ordered that for dessert. Compared to the meal Lily had gotten for us the night before, it was Spartan, and it cost more. Tip: Don’t eat in hotel. We decided we weren’t doing much of that any more.
Jen and I were jet-lagged, and Charlie had had his introspective moments, so we decided an early night was in order. I went over the plans for the next day with him again right before bed, reminding him that we were visiting the orphanage, but that he would be giving out presents and saying goodbye to his friends and coming back with us. He got it. We also talked some about the airplane flight coming up in a few days. He was excited that he would be flying in an airplane soon.
We went through our tucking in for the night routine, the I-Love-You hands and the kisses and then we all went to bed, exhausted.
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