Day 12

Day 12

Today we went to the Chimelong Safari Park just outside of GuangZhou (although it ended up taking us 2 hours between traffic and getting lost, ugh!). The park is enormous and marvelous and due to the cold, rainy weather, completely empty. Total heaven! We saw lots of different animals in very large natural exhibits -- it is truly the best zoo we have ever visited. Perrin's favorite was the Red Panda, Neal loved getting a chance to hold the baby White Tiger and I am torn between the seeing baby Koala bears in their mom's pouches and the multiple Panda bears we saw chillaxing with bamboo. Lulu's favorite (I'm guessing) part was munching on a Ritz cracker while watching the spider monkeys. We only had a few hours, but could have easily spent many more. My least favorite part was towards the end when I needed a bathroom. Neal and Perrin assured me that the toilets were nice and clean so off I went with Lulu strapped to my front (remember, she won't let anyone else hold her without screaming). The bathrooms looked clean, but when I peered in to the first stall, all i saw was a hole in the ground. I am fine with squatter toilets, but not when I have extra weight adjoined to my body off-kiltering my balance. I continued down the line of stalls: squatter, squatter, squatter, squatter, squatter, squatter, squatter, toilet! Saved by the handicap stall.

After the safari park, we headed off to the US Consulate to pick up a Visa for Lulu. The Visa allows us to exit China with Lulu on her Chinese passport. Once we land in the US and clear immigration, Lulu becomes a US Citizen (although we still have a few additional steps to complete the process). The Consulate was not very memorable except for 3 things:

1. We did not recognize our child's Chinese name when it was called -- after repeating multiple times someone had to say, "um, isn't that your child's name they just called"? I guess we had never heard Dong Jia Qing pronounced by a native Chinese person.

2. Neal is phenomenally bad at, "repeat after me". We had to take an oath swearing that everything we said was true. Neal just couldn't get the words out right in the correct order. "I do solemnly swear" became "I swear solemnly do". "Everything I have said or written to the best of my knowledge was truthful" became, "Everything truthful in my knowledge best... said and written". I kept looking over at him in disbelief hoping they wouldn't let his undiagnosed learning disability block us from bringing Lulu to the US. In reality, I think he was daydreaming about the the possibility of raising White Tiger cubs in our home.

3. There was another family at the consulate adopting a 2 year old girl. They approached us and asked about Lulu because she looked remarkably like their daughter. We have often wondered about Lulu's ethnicity as she is much darker and has different shaped eyes than the other 2 girls from her orphanage. Their daughter is from an orphanage in North China, just South of Mongolia. They said that the the other babies at the orphanage also looked similar. Neal now calls Lulu his Mongolian Princess.

Because we spent the entire day out, Lulu had both her naps while I was holding her. I blame this for the looooong time (and lots of patting and rocking) it took for her to fall asleep. I really look forward to getting in to a stable routine once we are back in Seattle.

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Amanda Myerson
cell: 206.949.7301
amandamyerson@gmail.com