Day 10 – Arriving in Hefei
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 50 abandoned kids living there, and they all have special needs like cleft lip or cleft palate, or worse problems like heart problems that need surgery. The Hefei orphanage has about 300 kids, and they have had over 20,000 kids adopted out from this orphanage.
So tomorrow we will drive 3 hours to AnQing. The last family who visited the orphanage there, was met by the mayor of AnQing, a city of about 600K, or 1 or 2 million, depending on who you talk to. They will try to find the nanny who cared for Sophie in the orphanage, and maybe the policeman who found Sophie. We have no expectations, but we know from other families’ visits that Sophie will be treated as a celebrity. Mr Ding is speaking to her as QinXin (Chin Shin) which was her Chinese name and is now her US middle name. Qin means Piano/Music, and Xin means Love/Heart. Sophie likes to think of it as ‘Musical Heart’. We are going to bring extra cash and hope to buy something for the orphanage. We will have lunch with the orphanage director and staff, and will get to visit the kids living there now.
Sophie and I decided to have coffee and a snack at the 5th floor lobby in our Hefei hotel this afternoon. The shy girl made us 2 Lattes in tiny little cups, and the menu was misspelled as “Lattle” and she also mispronounced Latte as ‘Lattle’. We thought we would be adventurous and try a Durian Cake but she wrinkled her nose and said it smelled terrible. So we got a couple shortbread cookies and dunked them in our tiny Lattles.
Our hotel room is on the 26th floor of the Holiday Inn tower but we can still hear the constant honking of cars far below. I was going to walk to a nearby park with a pagoda, but on second thought, looking at the pollution haze outside, I decided to just stay in the hotel. There is a rotating restaurant on the top (29th) floor of this tower hotel, and we had dinner there tonight because the other two restaurants in the tower could not provide me with a reasonable vegetarian meal. We had a lot of fun translating with the servers – I drew several pictures and there was a lot of giggling. I ordered a glass of red wine and they left a whole bottle of French red wine on the table. I wasn’t sure if I had inadvertently ordered a whole bottle of imported wine!
Sophie is feeling very emotional about our daylong outing to the AnQing orphanage tomorrow. We talked it over at dinner and she was worried about crying while she is there. I told her – everybody cries when they visit an orphanage. These days perhaps especially so, because all the kids are special needs kids.
Share Post:
