Poked and prodded

Despite our hideous travel to Guangzhou, we still had to get up in the morning.  All the kids had to have their physical exams done on Saturday morning in order to initiate the paperwork that would permit them to travel back to the States.  Basically it's to rule out communicable diseases as well as to give vaccines for the kids.  As bad as we had it with the flying, many others fared even worse.  Some groups, coming from other cities, didn't arrive until 5 am.  One poor family was stuck in Shanghai due to a cancelled flight, had to sleep overnight in the airport, then fly down Saturday afternoon.  They looked like absolute hell when we saw them checking in, bent wire-rimmed glasses, sunken chests, untucked shirts, and eyes that drooped out of their heads.  Counting my blessings.   Guangzhou is often called a Westernized Chinese city, but I don't think that's quite as accurate as saying it's cosmopolitan and modern.  By default, that makes it more familiar to Western.  Not just a Westerner, but someone from, say, India or Japan would likely find this city more "compatible" than any other in China.  The traffic is heavy but very organized, the streets are clean, most buildings are modern, the skyline goes on indefinitely, and most things are in at least Cantonese and English, sometimes other languages as well.  People are crisply-dressed with dress shoes and high heels, walking at a brisk clip with cellphones clapped to their ears in that semi-distracted, I'm-too-important-to-pay-attention-to-anything-around-me shtick that New Yorkers patented years ago.  Millions and millions of dollars of business are being done here every day.  And there's lots of major Broadway-type venues for shows as well as major hotels and convention centers hosting all sorts of conferences, etc.  Sort of like a Toronto with Florida's climate.   Speaking of which, the first thing you notice upon walking out of the hotel or airport or wherever, is the curtain of humidity.  It hits you, envelops you, and fogs up eyeglasses.  The second thing is the heat.  We're not in the teeth of summer yet, but the combination of 80-type mercury and high 90s humidity is a notorious synergy.  Normally I'd find it suffocating, but recovering from bronchitis, the wet warm air is a relief.  The third thing is how green it smells.  Guangzhou is a 10 million-strong city, yet its semitropical climate seems to scrub the air, making it smell like a botanical gardens in most places.  Much welcomed after contending with the filth of Beijing and Nanchang.   Before going into the physical exam details, a word about the accommodations.  The majority stay at the White Swan Hotel, which has become sort of a rite of passage for Chinese adoptions.  It's on Shamian Island, which historically was one of the few zones in which Imperial China allowed international trade.  It's technically an island, I suppose, because a narrow channel of water encircles it and short stone pedestrian/car arched bridges are the only way to get in.  Shamian Island is a neat spot, a mix of Charleston's antebellum architecture, New Orleans' kitschy shops and restaurants, and Bermuda's house colors and cleanliness.  More on the island later.  But, since the White Swan is the mecca of adoptions, naturally our agency booked all of us at the China Hotel 20 minutes away, run by Marriott.  Not sure why they did, but I won't complain because this pad blows the rickety doors off the Jin Feng Hotel.  More on the Marriott later.   Still in a daze from the night before, and still partially deaf from the air pressure changes, I didn't have the sense to bring my camera with us for the physical, so I'll have to describe the clinic.  Like a lot of points of interest, it too was on Shamian Island, so we had to take a chartered bus ride out on Saturday morning.  The clinic was part of a series of side-to-side row houses/buildings all along one street circumscribing the island.  It was a one-story grey building with an interior featuring polished marble floors and pillars.  The walls were stark white and the whole facility seemed aseptic.  The front section was a bit cramped and there weren't many seating areas.  They had several freestanding air conditioners strategically placed in the clinic, but they kept the doors open anyway.  The Chinese do that—even when it's hot and muggy enough to have AC, the doors stay open because it's supposed to be "healthier."    For us there wasn't too much to do, really, since Clarisse is in excellent health.  After waiting for a few minutes while our agent checked us in, we were escorted into a separate smaller room for a brief external physical exam.  The nurse practitioner/doctor/whatever was an elderly woman who looked like a yellow bulldog and didn't speak a whit of English.  I told her I was a doctor too, maybe getting some sort of trans-oceanic professional connection thing going.  Zero reaction.  Oh, well.  Clarisse was a trooper, didn't fuss a bit with the poking and prodding.  The next room was an ENT nook where her hearing and temp were checked.  She didn't much care for that, but not too many kids like having things stuck in their ears.    Since Clare is under 2 and already had several immunizations, she didn't need to get stuck again.  Older kids, especially those who were being adopted under new Hague requirements, had up to seven shots in that single Saturday session.  Those poor kids were in rough shape afterwards.  Making it worse is that, since many of those vaccines might not have been properly refrigerated, they might not work and the children will probably have to be completely revaccinated again in the States.  Another dumb new rule is that every kid over 2 with a positive PPD has to have a chest X-ray to rule out active TB before being allowed to leave the country.  But pretty much every child in an orphanage here has already received the TB vaccine, which means they're all going to be PPD positive even though they never had TB.  So every kid over 2 ends up being x-rayed unnecessarily.  Typical bureaucratic idiocy.   We were done before everyone else at the clinic, so we walked around a bit on the island.  There was a great deal of ongoing construction including torn up streets and chewed up sidewalks.  Piles of loose bricks, chunks of concrete, and other detritus were scattered in and around big holes in the ground.  Not stroller-friendly, for sure.  In fact none of China seems to be wheelchair- or stroller-friendly, even the more modern cities.        Once the rest of the group was done, we all gathered at a nearby Chinese restaurant for lunch.  Nice food, similar to what I've already talked about but with a higher meat: filler ratio.  Amazingly, after the harrowing travels the night before, several people (i.e. women) insisted on going shopping for an hour after lunch.  All of those hardy souls were operating on only a couple hours of sleep, and even though we were going to be on Shamian Island pretty much all week, they apparently couldn't wait to start collecting cheap tchotchkes.  Eventually even the shopaholics wore out, though, so the bus hauled us back to our hotel rooms where we caught a nap.   After the nap we of course had to eat dinner.  Lo and behold, like a beacon in the wilderness, the Golden Arches beckoned from across the street.  Nothing else seemed convenient and economical, so in we went.  Aside from the Chinese script it looked just like any other Mickey D's.  When the cashier saw us whiteys come up to the register, she whipped out one of those pictorial menus you see in the States that are reserved for the illiterate.  Nice feeling.  The Big Mac value meals tasted exactly like those in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Fat, bless their LDL-laden hearts.  After a week of funky mystery meats and miles of noodles, this went down awfully nice.  There were, however, a couple of wrinkles.  For one, you can't supersize the meals.  Drinks were about 12 ounces, that's it.  China in general doesn't do big drinks of any kind at all, even the Western-friendly eateries.  Seems like everyone is supposed to sip out of tomato juice-sized glasses.  And the shakes were thinner but more chocolatey than in the U.S.  We actually liked China's version better—they tasted like ice cream shop-caliber milkshakes.  Last, they do delivery out of McDonald's, consisting of a kid with a large modular plastic box strapped to his back.  At least they have the two-legged pack mule wear a bicycle helmet and put shiny reflectors on the backpack.   So that was Saturday.  I'll get caught up on Sunday's events ASAP.