After lunch we drove to the old building for the Social Welfare Institute. There are no babies or little orphan children living there now. These days it is an assisted living residence for seniors, and it also houses the older children and young adults who are mentally and physically disabled…who cannot live on their own. We were greeted almost immediately at the gate by a woman in a white lab coat, and she was introduced as Dr Xhang. She was the doctor who gave Sophie her first physical exam when she was first found and brought to the SWI. She gave Sophie all of her exams, until she left to…

Returning to the orphanage is the highlight, and the whole point of a Heritage Tour back to China. We did not realize that this would include a very formal re-opening and review of Sophie’s file from when she lived there. The brown file was tied up with a ribbon, and when it was brought into a conference room in the administrative building, about an inch thick of papers were pulled out from this file. We were offered hot tea, and fresh local tiny oranges and kumquats. Another big screen on the wall had the colorful greeting – “Welcome Sophie QinXin Rubin”. Another lovely lady came in to join us. She…

The director smiled and led us to the front door of the administrative building. On the front entrance was a big lighted screen lit up with the colorful message – “Welcome Sophie QinXin Rubin!”. As we got out of the car, I heard music playing softly on outdoor loudspeakers. It was Kenny G, the alto sax ‘smooth jazz’ musician. QinXin is the name Sophie was given in the orphanage when she was a foundling infant there. It means “Musical Heart” or “Music Love”. She was given this name long before she was matched with our family. We are pretty sure she was matched with us because our family portrait photo…

This morning Mr Ding and our driver came to our Hefei hotel to pick us up for the long drive to AnQing, to visit the orphanage where Sophie lived for 8 months. The haze from the pollution was very dense. The day before I had wanted to visit a park with a pagoda that we could see from the 5th floor lobby of the Holiday Inn, but I decided not to because I could barely make out the pagoda through the smog. I have certainly been in worse pollution in China – my trip to Beijing 10 years ago was spent in a dense fog of pollution – but the…

Futuristic Sci-Fi movies often have a mashup of dystopian elements that include elements of Chinese culture, marketing and technology. Today we experienced a couple examples of pervasive (and invasive) marketing while flying from Guilin to Hefei. On the flight, a young male flight attendant stood at the front of the aisle and proceed to do a extensive sales pitch for several seemingly unrelated items, speaking in a very loud voice that was supposed to reach everyone on the plane but with no microphone. We were in the third row so it was right in our face. He was hawking a large metal airplane model, a pink kids backpack, a blue…

Bathrooms in China can be a challenging topic for Western Women. Along with this topic comes the topic of washing out ‘smalls’ along the way. We have found just a few places with clean well-stocked ladies rooms on this trip, but we’ve also experienced some appalling bathrooms where we had to change our clothes as soon as we got back to the hotel after having to use these stinky dirty bathrooms. So even if I brought one pair of underwear per day for this 15 day trip, it would not be enough. Every few days I send out a couple pairs of pants and a shirt to be laundered. However…

We met our local guide Yvonne in the lobby and proceeded to our flight from Guilin to Hefei, in the Anhui Province. We are now traveling to Hefei where we first met Sophie, and then to AnQing to visit Sophie’s orphanage, and hopefully her Finding Place. (The place she was found when she was 2 days old.) When we arrived in Hefei, our local guide Mr Ding met us at the airport, and we had a car and driver to take us to our hotel. He explained about what to expect tomorrow when we visit the AnQing orphanage, which has moved to a new building. These days there are about…

We started the day at our Green Lotus Hotel in YangShuo, and the kids had a Tai Chi lesson in the hotel. Then we checked out and loaded up the bus to head back to Guilin. Since we took the boat cruise on the Li River to YangShua, coming back on the highway was a different view of the karst mountains. Just outside of YangShuo we stopped at the “Pearl Museum” which was just another shopping stop. We were led into a large room with chairs around a runway, and we were treated to a ‘fashion show’ with young ladies in gowns, wearing ensembles of pearl jewelry, walking up and…

We started the day in Xian, packed up and checked out of our hotel. We headed out on the bus to the Terracotta Warriors site. It was 16 degrees this morning…7 with wind chill. Ouch! The Xian hotel was probably our least favorite. The water smelled like burnt gas or some chemical. The food was not that great either. We did however see a wedding party in the lobby as we were leaving. It was the groom, holding a bouquet of red roses, making his way down the marble staircase to the decorated Maserati out front. Evidently the tradition is that he goes to pick up the bride and then…

Today we got up early and took a bullet train from Chengdu to Xian. There was some excitement at the Chengdu Train Station, trying to find a toilet. While waiting in a long restroom line, the woman in front of us did a long loud hawk and spit on the floor. Sophie just looked at me with big eyes. We’ve found that often the easiest Western toilet in a public place is the handicap toilet, but this one had a smelly flood all over the floor. So we stood in the long line, only to find at the front of the long line that the 20+ stalls (in a huge…