Xiamen City

I think the orphanage director was trying to drink me under the table!!  We went to Xiamen (pronounced Shamen) City to visit Cara's orphanage.  What an amazing experience, I think it easily was the best thing we could have done for Cara.  It provided her closure, I think.  A chance to say goodbye to her old life and the ability to say goodbye to those she has known for years.  She was not emotional - I felt I could have lost it at the gates of her school if I wasn't so tired by then.

So, here's how it went.  We took the train at 8:20am to Xiamen City - a non-stop bullet train, but it only went a little over 100mph.  You have not experienced China until you have been part of the cattle call to board a train.  Honestly, I would like to explain - everyone there already has an assigned seat and a ticket, right?  So there is no need to crowd on like your playing musical chairs and your going to miss your chair if you don't get there first!!  Doesn't matter, I think the Chinese are born with the 'coping with crowds' gene and there is no reasoning with it.  So, we get there.  Absolutely, lush, beautiful, green.  Very pretty.  I've really got to say I was not expecting the feeling of green and tropical - the Chinese really have a beautiful country.  It would be breathtaking if they valued form over functionally a little bit more.  See, they don't seem to care how something looks as long as it works.  So everywhere you look there are these truly ugly metal grills covering all their balconies and windows.  And if they are in the process of building anything you can count on the building site having discarded piles of rubble surrounding it.  There are clothes lines strung from end to end and most stores, etc. are a honge-ponge of whatever works to get them to their goal.  Tables may be made up of old crates and stumps.  The whole effect looks haphazard, discordant and basically not very attractive.  But it works! 
We were warmly welcomed at the train station and immediately went to Cara's finding place, problem is that after almost 14 years it has changed quite a bit.  There is now a storage facility and newer apartment building on the site - really hard to say where exactly she was found, but we gave it a go.
Then it was on to the orphanage itself.  Xiamen social welfare institute has a new building - poor Cara never got to live in it, but it looks really spiffy.  We sat and talked with the director (impressively - it was a woman) and some of Cara's friends from the orphanage.  We ate this huge fruit that looks like the biggest orange you've ever seen - a palmuloe, I think.  They invited us to lunch.  I had no idea that we were actually being invited to a lunch with the big-wig director of the whole welfare institute, if I had realized I think I would have been much, much more nervous.  As it was, we were 1/2 way into it before I realized the importance of the lunch.  I'm thinking we had really bad timing.  I think they had a lunch planned with another director from Beijing, in any case it ended up being 11 of us and they were serving area delicacies.  I do like sea food, but this was beyond my ability to cope with.  The problem is two-fold - the smell and the texture.  It just seems extremely slimy to me.  I did have some soup and Isable, our guide, whispered to me that she would let me know what was in it later - it was pig intestine and liver. The most intimating thing by far was the fact that the directors (there were about 5 of them there) kept toasting each other with red wine, and they were toasting me, Cara and Jenna, too.  Each toast required me to drain my glass (Isable whispered that is was polite to do so.)  It kinda became a joke with the directors as they continued to welcome us and wish us a happy healthy family.  Isabel mentioned that the head director (pictured here) will toast each three times, then two times then one time.  I'm not sure if it's the topic or the person he needs to toast repeatatively, but I was really drunk by the time lunch was over.  Isabel says the Chinese people feel that if you toast each other by the time the meal is over you have made another friend.  Well, I can see why - it's because you are falling down drunk and heck yeah, I'll be anyone's friend after about 6 toasts.  Then, of course, I need to toast the director several times - man, so much pressure at lunch!!  I'll remember that lunch for a long, long time to come!  I'll post more pictures after I've slept off my afternoon hangover!!
Cheers!