This blog will be just some of the pictures from the last several days that caught my eye.  No real stories here, or maybe just brief ones, so if you don’t want to see these pictures, feel free to wait until my next blog tomorrow!

Buying a screen saver for you phone is a BIG business on the streets.  There are small vendors EVERYWHERE who will sell them and install them.

A lot of women sitting around the streets knitting.  I don’t know why …

There are many places that offer cantelope on a stick!

Probably the largest incense burner I have ever seen, and it is sitting right out in the middle of a large outdoor shopping mall.

Seriously … Halloween is over, ma’am….

And who among us has NOT needed to purchase a broom in the middle of a busy street????

Kelly LOVED the pink outfit with the pink scooter…

This guy was selling bread.  Yes.  Pieces of bread…

They have these candied apples on a stick everywhere!  We have never tried them.  I wonder why?

This was my favorite sculpture.

I loved this next shot when I took it.  It was this grungy little alley and there was this nicely dressed lady walking down it.  Unfortunately, she decided not to cooperate with me!  Newman!

This next shot was suggested by Kelly.  Abby and I both took the shot.  I’m not sure how thrilled he was with the attention!

Depending on the day, there are a lot of beggars along the main shopping area.

People are selling potatoes, I’m thinking actually Yams, from the tops of barrels all over the place.

Cameron

OK, so I’m getting closer to getting caught up on this blog.  It is currently Thursday and I’m working on the Wendesday blog.  This picture thing has put we WAY behind.

To start with, a few facts about Ali, now that we know her a little better:

• She has a very husky voice
• You already know she is tall, but she is also a little gangly and somewhat uncoordinated.  Pretty … but uncoordinated
• She has a SERIOUS addiction to Chinese soap operas.  She watches them as much as we will let her, and it is a sacrafice because we don’t understand them and the acting is really, really poor
• She is incredibly giving and sharing.  The other night Brittany didn’t like the meal that she ordered.  We slid it over to Ali to see if she liked it, but she didn’t care for it either.  Then, Ali moved her own bowl over to Brittany and started eating the meal no one liked.  Obviously, we gave her meal back to her, but she does selfless things like that all the time
• She burps all the time
• She chews her gum VERY loudly (I hadn’t thought about this one until I was typing this out and she is chomping on it over my shoulder!)
• She had never taken a shower before
• She has never been in a candy store (see below)
• She had never been in a pool (see below)
• She is very loving.  Always holding hands and willing to be loved on

Back to the blog…

Yesterday, as you know, was shopping day.  Hence, how I got my card reader.  We didn’t do a LOT more shopping than that.  Mainly went to a book store and allowed Ali to pick out some books that she would like.  The day began with Brittany doing Ali nails … a right of passage in the Bernadsky household.

This morning was the first morning that Ali cried a little bit about the entire process.  She calls her nanny at least once a day and normally it is a happy time for her, but this morning it was sad.  After crying for awhile, she looked at some of the pictures from the orphanage the day before while Brittany comforted her.

She perked up pretty quickly and we went up to the 29th floor for our breakfast.  Remember I told you how much she eats?  This was ONE of her plates for breakfast:

She didn’t eat them all, but mainly because she didn’t care for the taste, not because she couldn’t!

After finding my card reader, we went into a local candy store for the girls to get some treats:

As I said previously, we went to a bookstore to buy some things for Ali to read and do for the next week and a half.  At the book store, they had a sign about learning English.  All of you that know English will be happy to know that your life has been perfected because of it!

Cherry led us out into the street and we walked down the main roadway through Hefei.  They have a cool circular sidewalk that goes around the major intersections.

After we returned to the hotel, we took off on a quest to find the stupid McDonalds that we couldn’t find the night before. 

(I love this picture below!  My bride!)

Below is Kelly’s favorite street begger.  He sees her coming a MILE away and starts rolling is skate board toward us!  You can hear him coming a MILE away!

We FINALLY found the McDonald’s (which, I might add, has very few hamburgers.  Mainly chicken.)  We found a nice little park across the street and ate our “healthy” food!

Kelly took a quick shot of the girls and me!

After such a nutritious mean, we needed to go work some of that junk off, so the girls went swimming!

As soon as she hit the water, the big smile that broke our hearts over a year ago came out FULL FORCE!  It is so wonderful to see her happy.  There were several pictures that we had received over the last few months that that joy seemed to have dimmed a little bit.  It is nice to see “Ali” back again!

Brittany and Ali being “sisters!”

Afterwards, it was tiem to brush out the hair …

Snuggle with mom …

And chomp on her gum right by my ear!

Gotta love her!

Later that night we went for a walk in the local park.  They have a decent amusement park there and as we turned the corner in the dark Ali saw all the neon lights from the rides.  One, in particular, really caught her eye and she excitedly wanted to ride it.  Now, I hate heights, but I don’t really mind rides.  In America.  This is some rinky-dink little park in the middle of nowhere China.  But, she was so excited I had to take her.  Since I didn’t have my camera, I will try and explain what the ride looked like.  On each end of of about a 60-foot arm was a car that held three people facing out on each side of the car.  The arm was attached at the mid-point and basically the entire thing spun one way and then the other is a large circle.  The only thing really holding you in was a “horse” collar that was buckling you in.  

Ali and I were all buckled in and she was all smiles.  First revolution she lost the smile.  Second revolution she started to cry.  Poor thing.  I’m a terrible parent.  Should have said “no”.  We stopped for a few minutes and then we started going the opposite direction.  I think Ali was feeling like the ride was NEVER going to end.

Now comes the part that cause ME issues!  They had to stop the ride to load people onto the cars … the cars at the OTHER end of the arm.  Meaning, we were sitting at the very top while they loaded the other cars.  In addition, there was no one on the “back” side of our car, so our weight was tipping us forward … and down.  We sat there with gravity pulling us against our restraints just waiting to plummet to our deaths.  I have to be honest.  I had to control my anxiety a little bit.  Nothing wrong with actually RIDING the ride, but just sitting there … FOREVER … staring down 60 feel of nothing.  We finally made it down and Ali is pretty much done with amusement parks!

Cameron

 

I’m not going to write much here.  Just show you the beautiful faces of the children in Ali’s orphanage.  Not everyone is called to adopt, but everyone can do something to make their lives better, no matter how small…

James 1:27 – Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this:  to look after orphans and widows in their distress …

Seriously??  I can’t stand this one.  I tried and tried to figure a way to stick her in my bag…

Ugh … here is the other.  I just CAN’T come back here again!  We CAN’T adopt them ALL!

Cameron

 

 

Today our guide, Cherry, took us to an electronics store and I was able to get a card reader for $6!  Nice …  Anyway, this is going to be a pretty picture heavy post, as will tomorrow.  So, it may take a minute to load completely.

We started our day on Tuesday with our first breakfast with Ali.  The girl eats a ton!  We are trying to figure out how tall she will actually become once her body gets all the nutrients it is desiring!

We had to go by the government center so that we could file some additional papers and Ali could agree, because of her age, that she does in fact want us to adopt her.  That is what she is doing here.  Phew!  She signed it!

Here the guide had to actually write the words on her hand for Ali to copy.  I will take it however I can get it!

She had to affix her thumb print to the paperwork as her hand was too big for all of her fingers to fit on the page.

Think this is a business??

Abby got a little tired of waiting for the process to be over.

After the signing, we drove out to Huainan City which is about an hour and a half drive from Hefei and is were Ali was actually from.  We were warned on the way in that the orphanage was in a very poor area, one that was heavily damaged in the Chinese-Japanese war (of which I knew little about until I started coming to China.  BIG deal here).  In addition, the orphanage was built in 1958 and is showing its age.  They are building a new one by the government center, but the current one is not the greatest.  So, I was expecting a city that was aged and poor.  Boy, was I wrong.  As we exited the freeway we down a modern eight-lane road that looks like a brand new city growing out of the ground.  EVERYWHERE was brand new construction, and we are not talking low rent stuff.

Here is a main intersection where you can see cranes everywhere as they construct dozens and dozens of new buildings and apartments.

This is something that I have NEVER seen in China.  Brick buildings.  I can’t imagine how much these apartments must cost.  And they were as nice as anything I have seen in the U.S.

High-end brick apartments as far as you can see.

This apartment building reminding me of something you we see in Orlando!

We turned on to a street that looked a little more aged than these, and then we turned down Ali’s street…

Quite different, huh?  As I told you yesterday, we pulled into Ali’s orphanage to the kids chanting her name and surrounding the van.  As she got out, they engulfed her and were curious about her new clothes, her new bag, and the the iPod that we gave her.

Ali took us up to her bedroom. A room that she shared with five other girls.

The children use the upstairs railing to dry their laundry.

Here are five of Ali’s roommates.  I don’t believe the little boy is one of them!

All the girls wanted to listen to the songs on Ali’s ipod!

All of the rooms had some amount of drawings on the walls.  Ali’s wasn’t too bad.

This is Ali’s “China mom.”  The lady that is the girls nanny.  Ali was very close to her and has called her several times.

Ali wanted to bring something back to the orphanage, so we brought a couple of presents.  She wanted stickers, but i just couldn’t find any at the store, so I bought Mickey Mouse pencils.

THEN she brought out the big bag of dumb-dumb suckers.  Oh boy.  Was THAT a success.  Poor Ali.  She was MOBBED!

Notice our guide, Cherry, stuck in the middle with NO way out!

Ali made sure that she went to all the rooms to insure that all the kids got at least one sucker.

This was the one time that I saw Ali get a little angry.  All the kids were pushing so much that some of the littler ones were getting crushed.  She pretty quickly put away the candy so that no one would get hurt.

We got ready to head out and look at some of the Love Without Boundaries rooms towards the front of the orphanage.

When we were down in the courtyard, the kids kept bugging Abby to take their picture and show it to them!  She was almost as popular as the suckers!

Kelly had her fair share of suitors also!

I guess the smaller clothes that don’t fit on the railing have to be dried in the window grates!

This is the area that the wash their hands and, I am assuming, their clothes.

I took a few more pictures of the area as we were preparing to leave.

Love Without Boundaries has several classrooms that they use for additional education and training.

It was time to leave the orphanage, but I had to get a couple of nice little pix of Abbs!

Cherry was trying to organize our going to lunch with the director, but he had too much to do to join us.

So, as we were leaving the kids came to say goodbye.  The next picture will probably haunt us for a very long time.  One of Ali’s roommates and friends has weighted heavily on Kelly’s heart.  As we were loaded up in the van preparing to leave, she came up to see Ali one last time.  I can’t find a more fitting way to end this post and prepare for the next one…

Cameron

 

I’m going to make this post pretty brief as it is going to be really hard to post without pictures.  I should have a card reader by tomorrow morning and will update with a complete post with pictures.  We arrived at the orphanage to a gaggle of children calling “Xiao Rui” and engulfing our van.  They all so love Ali and were happy to see her return for a visit. 

There are so many things from today to post that I’m not sure I will get them all.  But I will try.  Overall, I found the day emotionally moving.  So many beautiful young children, so full of life and smiles, and just waiting for someone to adopt them into a family.  And so many of them who will never get out of that orphanage.  Ali arrived at this orphanage two days after she was born and that is the only life she has ever known.  Somehow she was able to become the selfless, loving young lady that she is.  And she isn’t alone.  Many of the girls at the orphanage seemed to take a special interest in taking care of the little ones there.  

I can say that I would probably have brought home an additional two or three today if it was possible.  Kelly probably five or six.  While I don’t feel that everyone needs to adopt children, I do think we all should play a part in bringing some of these beautiful children to a place where they can be loved…

Cameron

The good news is that we picked up Ali this morning without incident!  (OK, so it has been brought to my attention that “Ali” may not actually be the correct spelling of her name.  Going forward, I am going to use that name with the understanding that it may well change at some point in the future. )  The bad news is that she has been sick the last couple of days and, while being a trooper, really isn’t feeling well.  Our understanding is that they gave her some IV fluids to help “perk” her up a bit, but we went for a walk this afternoon in the park and she ended up feeling terrible.  We went to lunch and she had to go back to the hotel with Kelly and one of the teachers from the orphanage who is here to help with the transition.

Below are pictures, but they are pictures from Brittany’s iPod as I have yet to find a card reader.  I think we will be able to find one on Wednesday, so until that point in time your are stuck with whatever I can do with Adobe Lightroom and the low quality picture that the iPod produces.

Here is a picture from the hotel restaurant on the 29th floor of the Holiday Inn.  The restaurant rotates and that rotation starts at about 8:30 every morning.  Someone SHOULD have told me that!  It kind of jerks as the gear mechanism takes hold and I seriously thought we were having an earthquake or the building was falling.  Now I understand that everything is just rotating … really, really slowly!

 

This is right after Ali had arrived.  She seems pretty nervous and unsure about the entire thing.  Poor girl.  There were three other families receiving children at the government center this morning, so it was a zoo!  The other children were significantly younger than Ali.  

The lady on the right is Kathy, the music teacher from Ali’s orphanage.  She cares very much for Ali and agreed to come to Hefei and spend the day and night here during Ali’s first day just to make sure the transition went smoothly. It was really nice to have her with us this afternoon and be able to tell us that Ali wasn’t feeling well and get her back to the hotel so that she could rest.  We have to head back out to the city where Ali’s orphanage is tomorrow to process her passport, and that is a 1 – 2 hour drive, so we are are hoping that she feels better by then.  No fun to have all this happen AND have to spend a bunch of time in the car when you are sick!

Note that Kelly and Ali have matching sweat suits, just reversed colors!  Nice …

Here I am signing the paperwork making Ali’s adoption official …

Kelly added her signature…

And our guide, Cherry, overlooked all the documents to make sure they were correct.  I had a little bit of a panic when I thought the the immigration official in China had not stamped my entry Visa.  But, after hunting around awhile, i found it!  Phew!

We are farther along in the process than we were yesterday!  We will continue moving one step at a time!

Cameron

P.S.  I took Abby and Brittany to the grocery store today to pick up some fruit.  On our way down the steps we ran into a Dairy Queen.  Seriously!  It was great.  There goes my foreign country induced diet! 

So, we are 24-hours in and Abby has about had her fill of people staring at her.  We tried to warn her.  We really did.  But tonight, as we stood outside Pizza Hut waiting for dinner, we were like a circus side-show for all the passer-bys.  In fact, the girl that was taking reservations out front went into the restaraunt several times to bring people out to stare at us.  I thought they were going to start taking pictures.  Abby said she was going start taking pictures of the people staring at her and see how they liked it.  I had to inform her that she didn’t have enough space on her memory card!  I’m dreading when they start touching her hair.  It won’t end pretty!

We found that the breakfast buffet is pretty good.  All things considered, this hotel was a good choice.

We found out that the pool, while quite beautiful, requires you to wear a swim cap.  That went over like a lead brick.  We will have to revisit that plan later in the week.  

We found English speaking HBO on the TV and watched Jaws this afternoon while we tried to figure out how we could overcome our jet lag and actually become motivated.

We warned Abby that what we order at Pizza Hut may not be what is actually delivered.  We ordered Hawaiian Pizza.  We received a Supreme.  It was still quite tasty and we enjoyed it.  However, we had to walk through about a million people to get to the restaurant.  And … there is this … smell.  I can’t tell you what it is.  It might be a spice.  It might be meat.  It might be trash.  We haven’t figured it out.  It is amazingly offensive and, while traveling to Pizza Hut tonight, we had to walk through a fairly large section where the smell was almost overpowering.  It does a little something to your appetite.  I think it completely took Brittany’s away.

Tomorrow is the big day!  We leave at 9:00 AM our time and head to the governmental offices to sign the adoption paperwork.  Ali will be brought to us there and then we are on our own! It is exciting and nerve racking all at the same time.  Not really sure how the next several days are going to go, but happy that we finally have the opportunity to experience it!

I have tried several options to try and get pictures off my camera on onto this website.  I went into an electronics store today and could have bought a 24″ Mac or an air conditioning unit, but NO card readers.  I’m hoping tomorrow I can figure out a better option with our guide.

Cameron

Just checked into the Holiday Inn in Hebei and took that BEST hot shower!  We were all a little worse for wear after being up for almost 36 hours.  We had not even left Shanghai yet and the girls were already making a shower schedule.  Somehow, I was picked to be first.  I didn’t understand why such an honor was bestowed upon me, but I wasn’t going to complain nor question it!

Our guide is a cute girl named Cherry.  She isn’t quite Ting Ting from when we were in Beijing last year, but she seems to have a lot of motivation and always has a smile on her face.  I think the week should go well with her.

The hotel is very nice, albeit the room is a little on the small side.  But we can make do.  The real test of a hotel in our world is the breakfast buffet in the morning!  It is on the 29th floor.  We will hold final judgement until the morning.  The other thing that is always important is the presence of a swimming pool.  And, there IS one on the 6th floor.  So, it looks like we are pretty set for the next five days.

I will post some pictures as soon as I can either figure out what is wrong with my card reader and/or buy a new card reader.  I tried to upload some pictures earlier today and it didn’t seem to be working.

I think we will try and get some sleep tonight.  The beds feel soft, but we probably wouldn’t be too picky.  Kim told us all about how her little Abby needs to have all this cushy stuff to sleep on.  Yeah, right.  Tomorrow I will post the picture of her deep in sleep on a hard bench at the airport.  You take what you can get!

We will post more tomorrow.  Have a great Saturday!!

Cameron

Well, we are sitting in the Shanghai airport after a LLOONNGG 14 hour and 40 minute flight from Newark to here.  We flew right over the North Pole, down over Siberia, Mongolia, overflew Beijing, and here we are!  Weather is dreary outside but relatively warm.  It is about 3:30 PM local time (3:30 AM back home) and we have SIX HOURS to wait until our next flight into Hefei!  But, that is OK because the flight from Newark was pretty nice.  Brittany was a trooper and didn’t throw up at all.  Wasn’t even sick.  Slept a lot (must have learned that from Taylor’s behavior modeling).  She did have a little bit of a melt down at the Cincinnati airport where she wanted to go home, but she stuck it out and has done great!  So has Abby!

The flight over was nice because it was a brand new Boeing 777 and they had on-demand movies.  I may never watch another movie again, but it sure was nice to have 160 movies to choose from to pass the time.  I think Kelly and I watched six or seven movies each!  We are pretty caught up on everything so would be happy to offer you movie reviews!  The food was pretty good, also.  We all were able to sleep (or, more accurately, doze) for a lot of the flight and I think everyone is feeling pretty good, all things considered.

We get into Hefei around 11PM local time and have a free day tomorrow, so we will probably just relax and get used to the time change.  But, all-in-all, a pretty good day!  Looking forward to tomorrow!

Cameron

Six hours left until we walk out the door at 3:30 AM.  Yuck!  But, we can’t wait to see Ali on Monday!  It’s a LONG trip from Newark.  Over 14 hours out and over 15 hours back!  Yuck again!  But worth every minute.

Kelly and Brittany have been ready for days.  Me?  I’m still not quite ready, but I am a LOT farther than I thought I would be!  Was thinking it was going to be an all-nighter, but I am seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.

If I don’t get a post off on Saturday, I should certainly be able to get one off on Sunday.  Stay tuned!!

Cameron