Paperwork?
Well, it appears we acclimated to China better than we thought. We've been hoping to travel to the orphanage from where we got our younger daughter, Siu Wan. We had planned to go there over the winter break, during the first full week of February. We had contacted our old adoption agency, Americans Adopting Orphans, to aid us in the process. They started the process in their usual helpful manner, but then we got concerned when we didn't hear from them for a while. They finally e-mailed us back the other day, to let us know that they had run into a roadblock. The orphanage wanted our visit to be all official and such--no showing up on the doorstep one day and asking if we could peek around. That was fine with us, of course, and we were letting AAO handle the details. Well, it turned out that the orphanage director insisted that we use a China based agency, Bridge of Love, to handle the details of our visit. Again, no problem. AAO sent us the contact information and we sent off an e-mail request to get the ball rolling. The response was prompt, but what they told us was simply shocking. We needed to contact them three months before our planned visit. Three months! For the past year and a half we've been living in a land where things happen at the last minute. A place where you buy your plane tickets a week in advance (to get the lower fare), where you can't buy bus tickets more than three days in advance, and where you send out the invitations to your wedding two days in advance. We had to pinch ourselves to make sure we weren't dreaming. But then we started to recall, vaguely, a former life in a distant land, where people actually had to plan so far in advance. Slowly we were able to recall those old skills and adjusted our plans. So now we'll try to visit at the end of April, during our May Day holiday week. Oh, well. I guess those folks in Beijing do things a bit different than us folks in Yunnan.
+++
P.S. I know the bus doesn't have anything to do with this post. I'm still blogging via Flickr, so I needed to use a photo from my photostream. It kind of fits, I mean, interrupted travel and all.... okay, I'm reaching.
posted by John @ 1:32 AM
<< Home