We had wrapped up gifts for Lily and our driver. I had managed to get a bunch of multi-purpose tools at a good price while in the U.S. You know—the things that had a wrench, three different screwdrivers, a knife, and a hammer all in one. These were nice, heavy ones, and I can feel my suitcase getting lighter every time I give one away. I started out with six. Two went to officials at Civil Affairs in Nanjing, one went to the teacher who accompanied Ms. Tang to bring Charlie to meet us, and now one to the driver. That left two of them sitting out, so I stuffed the remaining ones into a bag and handed over the wrapped one to the driver, who was supremely pleased at having been included in the gift-giving spree.
No time for breakfast today, nothing open this early. But we figured we’d have ½ hour to kill once we got to the airport and could grab some over-priced something-or-other once we got checked in and to our gate.
We got in line at the airline counter. As we were the next person up, Lily muttered that we had to get in line, she was just informed that the luggage machine in this line had stopped working.
Same thing in the next line. I think they were just funnin’ with us. I could feel our ½ hour margin shrinking.
Then we got in a line where the machine actually worked. Our paperwork was all in order, the suitcases took off on the conveyor belt, and we were ready to take our carry-ons and go through security.
Jen and Charlie made it through with no problem, but they asked me to open my carry-on bag. Sure, no problem. Opened it up, here help yourself.
The guy knew exactly where to reach—he was on a mission, ‘cause he had seen something he didn’t like on the x-ray. I must have looked like a ghost when he pulled out one of those tools and opened it up to show me the knife and shook his head no-no. Fortunately, this was not the United States. I think if I had done something that stupid going through American security, I’d have been handcuffed and hauled off for questioning. As it was, he merely said the words “check baggage” and handed me the tool. I reached for my carry-on, and he pulled it away from me, indicating that Jen could watch it until I returned from taking that to have added to my checked baggage. I finally managed to convince him that I needed to get in that bag, there were TWO of these things in there, and he had only found one. He looked a little sheepish at that, but let me get the second one, and sent me back to the counter.
Thank God that Lily, our perfect guide, never leaves the terminal until her guests are through security and she can’t see them any more. She was watching all this from a distance, knew something was wrong but couldn’t see quite what, until I got close enough. So she went back to the counter with me and helped me get them to bring one of my bags back. Fortunately mine were easy for the worker trying to find them to identify, since I had a bright yellow bungee cord around one suitcase and a bright green one around another. They brought one of them out (took them about 15 minutes, since they were already en route to the plane), let me stuff the tools in it, and then sent it back again.
I was finally allowed to go through security and rejoin Jen and Charlie. Sherpa was stewing because she felt she should have double-checked the packing. How did I end up with a sherpa with such a guilt complex??? We started the mile-long trek to our gate, and finally got there with 5 minutes to spare before boarding call. Not enough time to order any over-priced food.
They did serve a meal on the plane, which surprised us, since it was only a 2-hour flight, but none of it was to Charlie’s liking. I think he just wasn’t feeling very good. He was hot, and once we were up to altitude and the seat belt sign came off, I got him to ball up his coat and place it on my lap as a pillow. We removed the armrest between us and he leaned over and fell asleep in my lap for part of the flight.
He was a little alarmed when we hit some turbulence and looked at me to see if he
should start panicking, but from my calm “wow, isn’t this fun?” expression, he decided it wasn’t worth getting excited over.
I had explained to him before the flight started how the flaps on the wings worked when the pilot wanted to slow down the plane. He kept watching out the window periodically to see when the flaps would go up. He seemed to enjoy the landing, watching all the pieces. Jen keeps talking about what a genius Charlie is (doesn’t seem to be anything the boy can’t figure out), and she fully expected him to go fly the plane for the next flight now that he had it all down pat.
You should have seen his face, though, after we landed and were taxiing to the terminal. Remember in yesterday’s entry I mentioned that I wasn’t sure he understood exactly where we were going, just that he was getting his medical exam there and had to go on an airplane? Well, what I didn’t realize was that he thought we had just landed in America. You should have seen the confused look on his face when he read the Chinese characters for the city painted in big red letters on one of the hangars. Then he signed, “Chinese writing in America?” Oh, Lord, I just lost it. So I fished out a flight magazine from the seat in front of me, and fortunately it had a map of the whole of China in it, which I hadn’t had in the hotel room when I was trying to explain this whole scenario. I showed him where we had just spent 5 days, and where we had just flown to and repeated the highlights of why we were here, then where we were going next after this (Beijing) and some of the things we would do there, and then flew my hand off the page in the direction we’d be flying to go to America and signed “America there.” Ah, okay. Now he gets it. That explains the Chinese writing. This just wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
There was a guide to meet us and take us to the hotel (only one this time, thanks to Lily—the other agency had tried to mess this one up, too, but she caught it by coordinating with Dragon Lady and telling her to call them off). Our new guide was named Wen (pronounced more like Wun). Very nice man, but his English was very hard to understand. He didn’t quite seem to get the deal with Charlie, because he kept speaking to him. I explained that Charlie was deaf, and Wen would nod like he understood, but then talk to him some more. Okay, maybe he doesn’t understand the word deaf, not in his vocabulary. So I told him that Charlie could not hear him. He nodded sagely. He saw us signing. He asked him more questions.
I let that one roll off.
We were taken to our room, but there had been a misunderstanding. The room had only 2beds and no space for a rollaway. We called and asked what was going on with the third bed, and they sent up a roll-away bed that was so small Charlie’s feet would hang off the end. And in order to set that up, they had to remove the chair for the tiny little desk. And in order to get out of bed, Charlie would have had to crawl over my bed, because there was no space to get feet on the floor—the rollaway was sandwiched in between one bed and the wall. I went down and explained that there had been a mistake somewhere, they had us in the wrong sized room, we were supposed to have one of the Executive rooms. The guy at the desk tried to tell me that all the rooms at the hotel were the same size. I’m not buying that. I called Wen back and told him we had a problem that needed working out. He merely functioned as an interpreter between me and the hotel guy, parroting that the rooms were all the same size. He obviously was not going to raise enough of a fuss to get this worked out satisfactorily.
I miss Lily.
So I told him, in front of the hotel guy, “Okay, get us a different hotel. Now.”
That seemed to work. In order to do that, he had to call Jenny in Beijing, who handles all of OCDF’s reservations. Jenny got on the phone with me and I told her if the rooms were all the same size, we wanted to be in a different hotel. She told me to leave our luggage in the small room, go on to our medical appointment, and let her deal with this. So we dug out our paperwork and were about to head off to the medical appointment with Raymond, the guide handling our paperwork in this city, when they said they had a room they would like us to see and approve before leaving and before having the luggage transferred to it.
It was beautiful. And oddly enough, it wasn’t the same size. Imagine that! It had three twin beds. And they were soft western-style beds, not plywood boxes with pads. If we hadn’t had an appointment to get to, we’d have just sunk down and taken naps on the spot.
They gave us the room keys, and we took off running for the medical appointment. It went pretty smoothly. Charlie had to have 3 shots, but he barely even grimaced. He admitted later that evening that his arms were pretty sore, though. The doctor doing his physical was impressed that he had been taught to read and write Chinese. He was asking him questions by writing them down, and the only one that befuddled Charlie was the one about whether he had been an inpatient before. He underlined the characters for inpatient and gave the doc a quizzical look. Doc looked at me as if to say “what now?” so I explained in sign language to Charlie that the doctor needed to know if he had ever gone to the hospital and stayed there overnight for any sort of surgery (and I made sure to make the sign for surgery at the abdomen, because I knew that Charlie had had an appendectomy last summer). That he understood, and he wrote out to the doctor that he had an operation on his stomach last June.
I’m loving this. My new son of only 6 days is understanding and communicating better with me in sign language than with this Chinese doctor in his native language.
Deafies: 1, Hearies: 0.
Sherpa took off during the medical appointment and went to get water so we could at least quench our thirst when we got back to the room.
When we got back to the hotel, I felt like a total fool. There was no slot in the door for the room key to be inserted. I had shown Charlie at the hotel in Nanjing how to put the card in the door slot in the direction of the arrow and then wait for the green light, but here there was no slot. Yet I still have this plastic little card that needs to go somewhere, right?
As I’m standing there staring rather stupidly at the door, Charlie grabs the key card out of my hand, holds it up to a sensor on the door handle, and I hear this little “do-do-do-doooo do-doooo” tune that you hear right before the word “Charge!” and a green light flashes.
How did he know that? The boy grew up in an orphanage. He’s never been exposed to hotels and stuff like this before! How did he know that???? And why am I too dumb to have figured it out?
His grin at having figured it out for me just split his face in two.
Raymond came back to our room and we spent the next couple of hours doing paperwork for our consulate appointment on the 4th. Turns out we don’t actually go to that appointment, we stay in the hotel room while Raymond goes and submits the paperwork and the fees, and if all goes well, he’ll call us and let us know we’re free the rest of the day.
Finally, we got to leave for dinner. We were famished, having had only an airplane breakfast and no lunch, so we hit the streets looking for dinner. We passed by a place called Cow Bridge that Jen had heard great things about, so we went in. It was busy and noisy, but the menu looked….ummm….interesting. The prices were good. We found some great looking and great sounding dishes for us. Charlie, however, was another story. He liked the looks of everything on the menu, and the dish he chose was ostrich kidney in green beans. Ostrich kidney? Well, we already know he eats dog, so how bad can it be? Charlie definitely has an adventurous palate. I hope he doesn’t expect to be fed like this at home!
He enjoyed his ostrich kidneys. We enjoyed our dishes, too. I had a chicken curry that was very spicy hot (loved it!) and Jen had a mildly spicy beef dish that was really good, too. So we all left feeling fat and happy. And we go to sleep on soft beds that night!
The internet here is no better than in Nanjing. We were hoping things would be back up by now, but Lily had informed us before we left Nanjing that she had heard a report on the news that it wouldn’t be fixed until the 9th. It’s been taking about 5 minutes to load a single e-mail, and web sites take anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes to load, if they bother to load at all before timing out. But Jen and I decided that we simply had to start up the blogs again before we forgot too much detail of these early days. So we have been writing our entries off-line in Word documents and then copying them into the blog as we can get them to load. Slow and painful, but at least we’re finally starting to get some word to the outside world. Don’t know if anyone’s really paying attention, but at least we’re getting it down.
So ended the first day in GZ. Charlie dealt amazingly well with his first plane flight and is now a seasoned traveler.
Happy New Year, everybody!
No comments:
Post a Comment