Gearing up for the journey

In less than a week we will be in the same province as our son! It's so exciting.
We spent the day taking care of details...
the best thing was collecting the yuan...payday has a whole different feeling when you go get a stack of cash. Back in the States, half the time you never see your money, it just is automatically deposited, automatically spent. But here, you are going around GO in Monopoly and collecting the real stuff. When we first moved to China and experienced the cash payout we were a little freaked. Nobody except drug dealers in the States handles that many 100 bills, course they aren't worth 100 US dollars, but it still was a little mind blowing. Now we are seasoned cash kings and kick back and pretend to be laid back when we count the yuan.
The the social worker called. We love her, she's very cool. We had the foresight to update our homestudy in Decemeber. Actually we did it 2 days before we flew back to the US so we were really quite frantic, but tried to be calm while she was around. Imagine having your house checked out when you are leaving the country for 2 months. That was the physical part of the homestudy, the paperwork is always expiring, so she wanted to give us the report closer to the time of adoption. Anyway because we like to do everything under such pressure, we're meeting her in Beijing to get the copy of the homestudy. We are going to take the red eye train to Beijing and then try to find our hotel, then try to meet her at a different out of our price range hotel lobby to get the paperwork. She says it is very near the import store where we can get those things from home we miss but aren't for sale in Harbin. I don't even know what I'm hoping they have. My list of things I miss is very long.
The bad news about her call is that she wants an updated police clearance. We aren't criminals and if we were, we wouldn't still be in China, that much is a given. But for some reason, nobody wants to issue this document. I swear every piece of Chinese paper that is needed for the adoption has been this way. So we are hoping for a miracle to get this clearance before we leave on Thursday.
Then just to roll with the punches, the Wenzhou job cancelled. Ugh, more swine flu rumors. It's hard to understand. We are indeed Americans, but we haven't been there since March, so really we don't have cooties any more than anybody else. In America, you'd whine and say you can't discriminate. But actually in America, if somebody was from another country, you could claim that you wanted to hire a local. Even the UK says you need UK passport to teach English over there. So I guess, this situation really is no different than anywhere else in the world. It just hurts, because we are Americans and it is hard to hear that we are losing job opportunities just because we are Americans. So we are sending out those resumes again. The Wenzhou job was going to pay our way in the final step of the adoption, GuangZhou and home. Augh, we'll be half way there and what will we do? We wanted to pay for all of the adoption with the yuan, so we really hate to think about plan B (or in this case, it's about plan F now).
Fundraiser, fundraiser, fundraiser!!!

the stuffed family

On a side note, kudos to blogabond. Facebook is the latest to go down behind the Great (fire) Wall, but here I am typing a way at blogabond!

The poster that is everywhere. Creating loss of job and many mean looks.

The small print has what I believe is a little misinformation, the swine flu started in Mexico.

Gearing up for the journey

Harbin, China