Jiangxi - Our Journey - Part 2

After a few mishaps with the baby bottle, baby bath-time, and pushing sleepless girls around the room in strollers all night to entertain them, the following morning, still sleepless, we officially became the girls’ parents. Documents were sealed with our thumb-prints in red ink. They were now our daughters forevermore!

The next night – sleep, at last! Everyone slept. I was so exhausted that I didn’t budge all night. But sleeping in the same position on my side on a bed as hard as plywood wrapped in a blanket, I woke up with a bruise on my hip the size of a saucer! Gee, when they say the beds in China are hard they aren’t kidding.

The rest of our journey in Jiangxi province was both amazing and overwhelming. Although we had traveled alone, our wonderful agency had a full-time guide for us who was an essential help as we made the abrupt transition into parenthood. We were very lucky to be invited to visit our daughters’ orphanage a couple of days later, where we were warmly welcomed by the caring staff we had mistaken for our daughters’ family the night we first met them. Seeing the little village and people there was incredible, and I wished we had been able to spend more time visiting.

It was a requirement at the time for families to stay in the province for about a week before going to Guangzhou for the children’s visas; so it gave us a chance to see more of our babies’ home province and do a little sightseeing. One of our first stops was the Teng Weng Pavilion, a beautiful, well-known tourist location in Nanchang – here are some photos of the pavilion and yin yang garden.

Our touring was cut a bit short; however, by Marty breaking his toe on one of the cribs in our room. Luckily our guide did some shopping for us for souvenirs we had wanted to get before we travelled on to Guangdong province. Marty didn’t even hesitate to take the Chinese pills prescribed to him, nor balk at the stinky black paste applied to his foot to ‘take the blood out’. It was remarkable that a foot ten shades of black and blue looked perfectly normal within 24 hours – that stuff really worked! As they say, ‘When in Rome…’

We ended up spending a lot of time with the girls and relaxing in our hotel suite; and even enjoyed a daily Chinese soap opera as the girls napped called ‘Family’ with English subtitles that we made a point of never missing. It was so intriguing and we got so involved the storylines and characters that we wished there was a way to watch it from the USA when we got home.

Finally, we bid a fond farewell to Jiangxi province and headed south to Guangdong, where we would get the girls’ passports and visas…