Recap of Our Trip....Finally!

I started writing this post when we first got home, but got sidetracked with the demands of parenthood. The time seems to have disappeared since then, and Ryan has now been home for an entire month, so it's about time I finish this!

We stayed at the Agora Garden, in the business district of Taipei (pictures below of our hotel and the view from our suite). This was my first trip outside the U.S. and I always expected that it would feel very exotic to be on the other side of the world, but the area around the hotel looked and felt (except for the language) pretty much like any city in the U.S. These are some photos of the hotel, and the views from our suite:










(In this last picture, you can see Taipei 101 sticking up in the background.)

Other parts of Taipei definitely felt like we were in another country, as did Taichung and Miaoli. We were very conscious of our own "foreignness" even in the business district where we stayed, since (setting aside our physical appearances) we couldn't read, speak, or understand a word of Mandarin, other than the very basic words we learned for the trip, like nihau (hello) and xie xie (thank you). Although there are "American" places to eat all over Taipei (Subway, Pizza Hut, Chili's, Romano's Macaroni Grill), we had vowed to eat only "local" food for the sake of having a more authentic cultural experience. However, this meant we were unable to read any menus, so, not surprisingly, we made some dining mistakes, including my ordering (from a picture menu) soup with pieces of meat which -- upon closer view after we received our food -- turned out to be tongue. At another place where the wait staff spoke very little English (not that they should have spoken any), we were able to communicate an order for "chicken," but we learned that (at least in some Taiwanese dishes) chicken is served quite differently than what we are used to. We received a plate containing a pile of bloody cross-sections of a chicken neck and spine, with a thin strip of white meat surrounding the vertebrae, and a thick layer of yellow fatty skin around the outside. Our tour guide demonstrated a method in which you suck the white meat out from between the gross parts, but we just couldn't bring ourselves to eat it. So, we drank some excellent tea, ate some plain white rice, and called it a meal!

Anyway, here are some pictures from Monday, the day we met Ryan....

Rob before breakfast at the hotel Monday morning (our last meal as a childless couple!):


Eyeing the pastry case in the hotel lobby (which we frequently patronized later in the week, when we were hotel-bound at dinner time due to Ryan's off-schedule napping):


Me with my first-ever diaper bag, fully loaded:


We left for the 2 1/2 hour drive to Taichung at 8:00 Monday morning (we hired a driver/tour guide who has a close relationship with the foster care agency and regularly provides this service to adoptive families). We had been so full of nervous energy the night before that we woke up at 3 am and never fell back asleep, but during the actual drive, we both felt very calm and relaxed and just READY to meet our son.

We first went to the office of the foster care agency which placed Ryan in his foster home and matched him with us. We recognized the office from the background of many of the monthly update pictures and videos that we received. A bilingual social worker from the agency then took us to meet Ryan and his foster mother at her home, a few blocks from the agency office. Ryan had just woken up from a nap in his stroller and was clinging to his foster mother, who he had been with for almost 8 months and was clearly very attached to. She was a very sweet lady who had obviously taken excellent care of Ryan. He hung on to her while he checked us out.


We were at her home for 30 to 40 minutes, and were able to converse with her through the social worker, to learn about Ryan's routine, habits and quirks, and what his life was like while he lived there. There were 6 adults living in the home (foster mother, her husband, his parents, and the 18- and 19-year old son and daughter of his foster mother), so Ryan received LOTS of attention. We are so happy to have pictures of him with his foster mother to put in his lifebook, and of course, we have lots of video of meeting Ryan for the first time. In imagining this day during the preceding months, I had always thought I would cry when I first saw Ryan, or when I first held him. But when the actual day came, I had no tears until the moment when his foster mother had to say goodbye to him. She was very professional about it but we could tell it was difficult for her, and we knew it would be quite a transition for Ryan to be taken away from the people and environment he was familiar with. It was really quite a heartwrenching moment, and we often think of his foster family and how much they must miss him.

Ryan's birth mother did not come to meet us that day. We did not know ahead of time whether or not she would decide to come, so we operated on the assumption that she would so that we would be emotionally prepared, and also prepared with a list of questions for her on information we'd like to have for Ryan, such as how she chose his name, what region of China his ancestors came from, any special talents that run in the family, and, of course, whether there is a family history of any particular health issues. We were told that she did indicate to the foster care agency that she would like us to send her yearly updates and pictures of Ryan, so maybe we will be able to establish some level of communication with her through that. The social worker from the foster care agency was able to answer one of the questions we had for Ryan's birth mother -- the meaning of his birth name. We were excited to learn that the part of his birth name that we intended to keep as his middle name means "royalty" -- very fitting since the name Ryan means "little king"!

I wish we had planned to stay in Taichung for a day or two, after I learned that it is the "tea capital" of Taiwan, with teahouses everywhere (and probably also the place to get bubble tea, which we did not see in Taipei).

Pictures from Monday are posted in our blog entry from 7/10/07 (below). As is obvious from the pictures, car seats are not used in Taiwan -- you just hold the baby on your lap! The whole "adoption day" experience was so intense and surreal that we didn't dwell on it much that day, but there were times later in the week when it was really stressful, like the winding mountain drive in Wulai and the drive to the airport in heavy traffic Friday evening.

On Tuesday we took a drive to Miaoli County, where Ryan was born. The previous day, our social worker had directed our driver to the particular area where Ryan's birth family lives, so we were able to get a sense of the area and take some pictures for Ryan's lifebook. Our driver also took us to a beautiful temple in Miaoli. When we entered the temple, he asked to hold Ryan and lifted him up to the altar for a few moments. We didn't realize at the time that this had any special meaning (our driver spoke very little English), but when we got back to the car, he called the social worker at the agency in Taichung and had her explain to us that, according to legend, if you take a baby to this temple, the gods will watch over him. Very memorable part of the trip, even without pictures (we didn't know if it was ok and didn't want to risk being disrespectful in a place of worship).

After Miaoli, our driver took us to Wulai, an aboriginal village in northern Taiwan. It was a beautiful (but nerve-racking) drive along the narrow, winding mountain roads. This part of Taiwan, with the enormous green mountains and even some waterfalls, reminded us somewhat of Kauai, which we fell in love with on our honeymoon.


At Wulai, we saw an aboriginal dance performance, and, during the second half, were drafted to participate on-stage in some type of ceremony, which I think was a wedding (although, based upon the choreography, it did not seem that we were being married to each other!) The female performers, who were all very petite, were in disbelief at the size of my head when they attempted to put the ceremonial headpiece on me (although I am completely average size by American standards). It then proceeded to fall off at least 3 times during the "ceremony." Wulai is also where we had the chicken-neck-and-spine lunch.

On Wednesday, we had our appointment and "interview" at AIT (American Institute in Taiwan) to submit Ryan's immigration paperwork, which consisted of 3 or 4 U.S. government forms. We had to pack a ridiculous amount of supporting documents for this appointment (3 years of tax returns, last 3 months' pay stubs and bank statements, accountant affidavit of self-employment income, 6 copies of passport photos, the list goes on....), just in case they asked to see them. After all the time and inconvenience of digging up and copying all this stuff, they accepted and processed the forms without a single inquiry other than a conversational, "Is this your first child?" We were very amused by some of the questions on the DS-230 immigration form, as applied to a 9-month old baby, such as whether he has ever committed a crime of moral turpitude; whether he intends to enter the United States to engage in espionage, sabotage, or the overthrow of the United States government; and whether he seeks to enter the United States for the purpose of performing unskilled labor without certification from the Secretary of Labor. After you submit the forms, AIT then faxes them and the baby's passport photo (SO CUTE) to Washington, and you return the following day to pick up his visa.

After AIT, we did some sightseeing, including the Grand Hotel, the changing of the guard at the Martyr's Shrine, and the National Palace Museum. We only have video footage of these, so no pictures to post here (at least until I figure out how to extract still photos from the footage, which, given my infinite free time these days, will surely be very soon -- ha!) Our driver then took us to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, where we had AWESOME beef noodles. It was disgustingly humid that day, so we decided to head back to the hotel after that.

On Thursday, we went to the Taiwan College of Performing Arts and saw a 30-minute Chinese opera, and a mind-blowing acrobatic performance. Ryan loved the acrobats, particularly the flame jugglers -- he was waving his arms and kicking his legs and laughing as he watched. The most memorable part of the performance was a woman on a platform about 6 feet in the air, who was balancing on one end of a board that rolled back and forth on a log. Another performer would then place one bowl after another on the opposite end of the board, and she would tap her foot on her end of the board so that the bowl on the opposite end flew up in the air and landed on top of her head. She repeated this a number of times, with each successive bowl landing inside the previous bowl, until she had a stack of 5 or 6 on her head. She then started juggling flames, with the bowls still on her head. The opera was fascinating as well, although Ryan was afraid of the music. Prior to the show, we were invited to dress us up in Chinese royal attire. The crown weighed a TON, and once again, my head was too big for it, so it was a balancing act to keep it in place for the picture.


Some of the performers also tried to teach us a yo-yo-like trick where you balance a spinning wooden spool on a string by moving the wooden handles at either end of the string up and down. It was a lot harder than it looked when they did it!






After the show, we went back to AIT to pick up Ryan's visa (fortunately they believed his sworn statement that he has no intention of overthrowing Congress), experienced more excellent beef noodles for lunch, then went shopping at the Taiwan Handicraft Center, a 4-level store full of (as the name implies) locally made items. Rob, who generally can’t tolerate shopping of any kind for more than 5 minutes, selected (entirely on his own!) two perfect items for Ryan’s room -- a wooden ship with a dragon motif, and a parchment wall hanging with a scene of the beautiful mountains of Taiwan.





On Friday we went up in Taipei 101, the world's tallest building (also with the world's fastest elevator). The view of the city and beyond was amazing, and it really gave us a sense of how HUGE Taipei is.




(Ryan looks pretty awestruck too!)








(I look about a hundred years old in this picture, after just 3 sleepless nights -- I expected that parenthood would age me, but I didn't think it would happen THIS quickly! :-)

One more picture from the trip, which I couldn't resist taking -- Rob the Civil War buff's uplifting choice of reading material for our adoption journey:


We're thankful we arrived back in the U.S. safely, but the trip home was nothing we want to repeat anytime soon! Ryan did better than we expected but still had a few major meltdowns. He had recently started crawling (in the form of dragging himself along on his stomach), and was so frustrated at being confined to our laps for 28 hours, that when we got home, he spent a good 20 minutes just rolling around all over the living room. Our decision to fly coach on the domestic flight was also a huge mistake, in terms of our own comfort -- we were stuck with a middle and window seat, and the diaper bag -- which we needed to keep right at hand -- didn't fit under the seat, so it robbed us of the little leg room we otherwise would have had. I should have taken a picture of my hideously swollen ankles as a reminder to ourselves in the future (lest we forget over time) to never again fly coach with a small child!

We are still so thrilled that we finally have our little guy home with us. I promise all the pictures in the next post will be of Ryan -- and that I will post those in the next few days!