Good to Really Bad to Good

Nothing happened on Tuesday so I watched Hancock again. The next day was awesome. My dad and I destroyed cabinets with mallets and sledgehammers. There were these huge 7 ½ foot cabinets and my dad would pull them straight to the ground and we would break them apart with sledgehammers and mallets. The next day started off okay, but didn’t end that way.
We went to Home Depot to buy oil-based paint (which they didn’t have). I saw this cool knife. It was the Chinese version of a Swiss army knife. It was only 38 Yuan which is about $5.00 so I bought it.
At the house, I threw all of the debris in a large trash pile. Well, that was all that had to be done that day so I went back to the apartment.
That night we were getting ready for a Halloween party. I didn’t have a costume so I wore some camo, put black stuff under my eyes and brought my knife. I was meant to be an army soldier. At the party, they had pumpkin carving so I tried it out with my new knife. After I cut a whole in the top, I decided it looked very uneven. I guess I didn’t know what I was doing because I stuck the knife in the bottom and worked my way up. The knife went right through the top and struck me in my left index finger. There was blood everywhere. I had to go to a Chinese hospital and get three stitches in my finger. Luckily, there was a doctor at the party who used to work at the hospital. So, she brought us in the back door, literally, and I was stitched up immediately. My entire left hand was red with blood.
The next day we went sight seeing. We saw the Terra Cotta Warriors, the Xi’an City Wall, and the market, in that order. I loved the market because you can bargain a lot, which got me a new pair of sun glasses.

Lazy Days

Not much happened this day. I sat around the apartment playing my PSP, and my dad went with some other guys to pick out tiles for the house. When he returned he told us that he had been on a mini-adventure. He told us about the sights he saw in a very industrialized part of Xi’an. For dinner we went to a great restaurant called Dolce, which my dad went to for lunch. They had this pizza with some kind of hot pepper on it. I can eat sandwiches filled with jalapeños without twitching, but I took one small bite out of the pepper and my entire mouth burned to the point where I was almost on the ground. The next day was incredibly boring. There used to be babies that needed “extra attention,” in our apartment and there was always at least one crying and/or screaming. Well, they moved them to the other apartments. I went to the house with some other volunteers so that I could get out of the apartment. It was just two hours of looking at how everything is going along. The rest of the day was somewhat normal. There were two huge cases filled with DVDs and I got to watch Hancock. My mother wanted to add that I have been keeping up with my school work - math, social studies and language arts. We are going to work on math and science tomorrow. For math, I will be creating an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of inventory for the upcoming move. The plan is to move the babies on December 1st

Starfish - Settling In

At Starfish we had a day to rest. The next day we went to the house we are suppose to renovate. All we did that day was clean a large room that wasn’t going to have much purpose when finished. It is where the kids will run around on cold days.
To clean it, we swept debris, scraped the plaster off the walls, and I used a tire iron (and later a hammer) to pull nails out of the walls. The next day I just sat around. I was going to visit the Xi’an panda sanctuary (which is closed to the public, but one of the former volunteers is working there right now), but there was a Japanese protest somewhere in the city, so the women who were going to take us there were afraid to go anywhere. That stunk.

The First Few Days

Over the first few days we moved around a lot. First of all we flew to Dulles to catch a plane to China…We missed that plane. So we had to go back through the entire airport and wait about an hour to get our bags back. The next day we caught the plane to Beijing, China. Throughout our trip to Beijing, we couldn’t go anywhere without our luggage (four suitcases and four backpacks, including my little brother Jake’s baby carrier).We went to Shepherd’s field which is part of Philip Hayden Foundation and we went to Jake’s old foster home, Amazing Hands. After that we went on an overnight train to Xi’an, China. The train ride lasted for about 11 hours. Each sleeping compartment was a little larger than a closet. It contained two bunk beds and a small table. They gave us around ten pairs of slippers, but the bathrooms were so disgusting (one had a squatty potty - which is like a fancy hole in the ground) that each time we went in, we ruined the pair of slippers we were wearing. After the train ride we had to go through a large train station and we didn’t know where to go. So we followed a crowd of tourists and in about 15 minutes we were out. We found the driver (whose name no one can pronounce so they call him “Apple Guy”), who drove us to Starfish, which was our final destination.
We ate dinner at a dumpling house, which is my family’s favorite Chinese food. And now, here I am, writing this blog entry. More tomorrow.

A Month In China

Hi, my name is Ryan and I'm going to China for a month. A little over a year ago my family and I went to China to adopt a baby named Lu Chun Jiang, now known as Jake. I have a dog and a cat and I live in South Carolina. My family and I have been preparing for this trip by taking Chinese lessons. I will begin to post things daily after we leave on October 17.