unwinding and flaming needles

i think there was an entire post that blogger or the great firewall of china has lost for me. i'll have to double check and repost it, eventually. in any case here is the latest for today:

just a few minutes here in the business center before we go on a group trip to the health clinic. some of the folks want to try acupuncture. i want to take pictures. amy wants to see how cleant he needles look before she does it. i might try one just for a good pic! see the lengths i go to keep the fans happy?

yesterday we toured an academy that was started 1200 years ago and is a part of hunan university, which chairman mao attended. he was born not too far from here. check flikr to see some pics.

we also went to a silk factory which hunan province is also famous for - at least that's what i'm told. but i can see why. i also have some pictures for you to see there. everything is emroidered. not painted. amazing. and they have two sided silk pieces that are, say, a tiger on one side and a panda on the other. unbelievable.

i left joy and amy at breakfast. they are coexisting fairly well this morning. i think joy has decided that if it's just the three of us then she's with me. but if she's in a crowd amy is ok as long as i am close. we'll see how they've faired with me completely absent from sight. tonight i'm going with the guys to get a foot massage that amy says is amazing. and foot is some what of am isnomer because she said they massage all the way up to the groin. or maybe that was the guy just getting fresh with my wife. i'll be doubly disappointed if i don't get treated the same. but, now as i type, if it's the same guy i may be happy to have him not massage that far up my "foot".

it's great to read your comments. hope the formatting on the blog didn't go bad with that last post! can't see it myself. tomorrow is another day of waiting and then saturday we take off for guangzhuo. joy's first plane ride.

right now it's all good. i'll keep you posted.

well - i'm no longer at the business center but am back at the laptop in our room. blogger decided to do a database upgrade right in the middle of my post. so i have the text of the post saved but didn't actually get it posted. and i'm really kinda bummed. i only have a 128mb memory card so after each trip i have to dump the pictures off the card to the laptop and then i'm good to go again. with iphoto tanked like it is i have to manually copy the photos from the card to the laptop. no sweat. unless you think you uploaded the photos to the laptop but actually didn't. so when i deleted the stuff off the card from yesterday i lost em all. it could be worse, though. it wasn't of us meeting joy for the first time. it was of the thousand year old school and the silk factory. we took video at the school but i lost all the pics at the silk factory. i'm not the only one here taking pics so i'll get those from somebody else later. but can't share them with you now.

but i now i have pictures of our trip to the acupuncture clinic. everyone had some sort of real problem they asked to be treated - old sports injured shoulder, lower back pain, cold, etc. i just wanted to try it. so while amy (chronic shoulder pain) got stuck with needles that they later lit on FIRE i just got stuck with a few needles that they twisted like screws every few minutes. can't say i feel all that much better because there wasn't anything really wrong with me to begin with. no surprise there, if you asked amy i would say there's never anything wrong with me. but it was an interesting experience none the less. the strangest part was i could feel the needles they stuck in the back of my hand being twisted on the inside of the palm of my hand. my right arm is actually more sore now. but that couldn't be because i've been hauling a 22lb of Joy across the city. oh, and they stuck a freakin' needle in it, too.

joy is already living up to her name. she smiles all the time. loves babies. loves the baby she sees in the mirror. has a blast dropping things to the floor. and she gets a kick out of me doing the dubbed karate movie voice. after we got back from lunch, more on that in a second, she just kicked and scooted along the bed grabbing what ever she could get her hands on. just smiling. just having a good ol' time. then she passed out. first time she's fallen asleep not in my arms. very nice! oh, and her and amy got to chill together most of the morning. i did manage to delete some sweet pictures of them at breakfast together. guess i'll just have to take more later. she was really on quite the buzz. at first we thought it was because she just was happy to be here with us. then amy remembered she and joy drank a lot of green tea at the clinic. how cool is that? they served us gobs of green tea at the medical clinic? it was interesting to say the least. and amy says her shoulder hasn't felt that good in forever.

these girls are all coming out of their shells. they've started to accept this new phase of life and are even deciding it's not so bad. i think joy has never really been able to just scoot along on the floor. she certainly hasn't been given this much chocolate ever before. and it all punctuates how this is such a strange way to go about gaining a daughter. but i love it! i don't feel any different about joy then i do isaac. i've gone through the same emotions as i have right after he was born. the whole thing is just as wonderfully strange now as it was then with the added bonus of being in a foreign country and eating at a restaurant where they serve alligator.

oh, yeah, lunch. so this meat market amy saw the other night on her way to the foot massage, which i'm going to the place tonight, let the reader understand, has an alligator in a cage that sits on top of a cage that has turtles. in tanks they have all kinds of fish and shells and eels and what have you. i didn't really think about this meat market being attached to the building where we decided to have lunch until after we were already inside and seated. it was pretty comical. there was no english menu. i did have a little cheat sheet laminated card with all kinds of phrases and things on it but there weren't any chinese characters for ordering food, just pinyin. most chinese can read a little english since that is what they are taught in school but if i just point at rice and noodles who knows which version of rice and noodles you end up with? and on the pimsluer CD the only phrase i could remember at the time was how to order two bottles of beer. so that's what i ordered was two bottles of beer. on the one hand i'd have to say my finely honed mandarin skills paid off. we did get noodles and we did get rice. we did get two bottles of beer. two large bottles of Heineken. and the other couple we were with don't drink beer. the rice was the greatest success as it came in four individual bowls. the noodles were more of a noodle soup with some sort of mushroom and green vegetable and some kind of white meat in it. both were delicious. the other couple we stopped on this little adventure with are not beer drinkers. but being as it was so very hot and it took an hour and half amy and i downed both bottles, for the most part. crossing the street in china is it's own sort of blood sport. i was a little worried my blood alcohol level would be too high for competition but it turns out it actually helps. while tonya and i stayed at the table with the kids chris and amy headed over to the fish tank to point to what we wanted to eat since there were no pictures in the menu. when we walked in we were the first ones there for lunch, except for an elderly couple in the corner. i've learned some things are universal: western doctors and eastern doctors have the same look about them. they give you the same sort of gaze, talk to you in the same way, look at you over their glasses. except in china you have no idea what they are saying as they stab you with very long needles and light them on fire. and elderly couples, whether in miami or changsha, have lunch at quarter to 11 in the morning. so, chris and amy pointed to a cod fish - that was still swimming - and a lobster - that was still, doing whatever it is you call a lobster does. the point is, one minute they were alive. the next we pointed at them and took care of that problem. i ate both. and both were good. won't hurry to do so again and won't bother getting a whole plate or anything but all in all, good stuff. the bigger challenge was figuring out how to "cut" the fish and lobster with our chopsticks. we managed. and joy is a great eater. she loves to eat. don't know if you can tell by looking at her.

by the way, she's a size 18 months, for the most part. i mention it here because i know there are grandparents reading all this.

i might post again tonight after the massage. one more full day to kill and then we'll have joy's passport and our officially stamped adoption decree. then saturday afternoon we hope the plane south. amy is thinking about going back for more acupuncture on saturday morning. i just know i'm going to end up having to push her through the rest of the trip because they will have bruised or fried some nerve or something. there is a movie theater next door. i may try and see a movie. it'd be good excuse for amy and joy to bond some more. as i type this i realize i lost a picture i took of a movie poster in chinese for star wars 3. it was playing at the 1000 year old university. i'm sure there's something profound i could learn from that but i'm just bummed i lost the picture.

well, again, apologies for the poor grammar, typos, and general abuse of the language but i'm not stopping to do much proof reading. love to you all. oh, email me if you find out if there is a starbucks anywhere in china.