Dinner Stroll

We decided to take a walk before dinner. Call it Real China 101. This is not a fancy neighborhood. These folks are not like the BMW and Land Rover crowd from Beijing or Chengdu. They are day to day plain Chinese working to put food on the table. It occurred to me that since we were only a few blocks from Amanda's finding site it was very likely if she had not been adopted, this would be her standard of living. It was a very sobering moment.

We walked a couple of blocks before venturing into a shop to buy some bottled water. You wouldn’t think buying three bottles of water would be a difficult exercise, but they spoke absolutely no English and my Mandarin is pretty much useless for meaningful dialog. Somehow we managed to understand each other enough for me to pay 4.5 yuan (about 75 cents) for three half liter bottles of water. This same size bottle was 25 yuan each at our last hotel if you used the ones in the room.

There didn’t appear to be any restaurant that would work for us other than the Kentucky Fried Chicken half a block from our hotel. We knew from experience in Chengdu that most fast food restaurants have a picture menu that we could just point to and select items. When we got up to the register and the clerk realized we were Americans, she looked a little confused and turned to some of her coworkers, who immediately all ran to get the (apparently) only person working there who might be able to help. A young man came over, smiled, and said in perfect English, “Welcome to KFC. May I help you?” It was clear from his body language that he enjoyed using his English to help us with our order. I made sure to tell him before we left that his English was excellent. It was kind of fun to see how tickled he was to be speaking English with us. Jerri and the girls were waiting at one of the tables for me to pick up our order and noticed some teenage girls looking at them. Jerri smiled at them and they giggled. We’ve gotten that reaction a couple of times here. In other cities I’ve sort of ignored the stares when they’ve been close by, but today I’ve actually looked directly at them and said hello, which elicits smiles and giggles. Westerners must be a real rare sight in this part of China now that the number of international adoptions has dropped significantly.

Tomorrow we visit the orphanage and Amanda’s finding site before hopping on a train bound for Nanchang. It’s a very busy, very long day.