1) ISP sends ships the modem to us in the mail.

2) Tech guy comes over to the house to flip a switch and plug the modem in to make sure it works.

3) The day after the tech guy visited, someone over at the ISP headquarters or phone company or something flips a switch to route the DSL river toward our house, thus actually activating our internet connection.

In America, the entire process would be done by machines, but it would take less than a week. In China, it would require a dozen people and ten hours, but would be completed within a day. Yet here on the continent that created a special fork just for fish, it takes an entire month. It’s like the entire country is on an eternal coffee break.

Regardless, we have internet now, and I have two and a half months worth of Austrian adventures to post, so hopefully as I get a few free minutes here and there this week, I’ll get a bunch of new stuff up.

Before I’d finished finalizing the details of my flight, August 1st, the dreaded packing date had arrived. The movers were horrifyingly on time, Christian and I were both unfortunately hung over, and the apartment was already a complete wreck. Having never partaken of nor witnessed an assisted move before, neither Christian nor I really had much idea of what the whole thing entailed. We walked threw the house, army of uniformed movers in-tow, and pointed at what we wanted shipped. Then before the command had even made it through the translating chain, poof, it was wrapped, taped, and hidden away in a box that was then assigned a number, a label, and the owner, “Mr. Christian.”

Soon enough, the movers were on auto-pilot like some kind of blue-jump-suited, multi-armed Rube Goldberg Machine, leaving Christian and I with a surprising amount of leisure time and far too little coffee–thanks to the packing of our espresso machine–to properly enjoy it. We took turns walking the dog, playing on the internet, and blaming each other for items that mistakenly were or weren’t packed while the moving machine toiled away. What we didn’t do, however, was kill each other. The movers, whether their blessed swift indiscrimination took the thinking and the arguments out of our hands. No longer was moving a matter of forethought and planning and trying to get rid of one another’s possessions. Moving, rather, had been reduced to its purest essence: pointing and taking naps.

In the end, a few things got packed that shouldn’t have, virtually Nico’s entire wardrobe for one, one of the landlord’s couch cushions for another. A few things didn’t get packed than should have–Nico’s winter coat–but for the most part, everything magically ended up where it ought, and by 2 pm Monday all of our possessions (all 103 boxes) had been loaded into our container in preparation for their two month voyage to our new home, leaving us with an apartment filled with echoes and a marriage still intact.

It’s been a whirlwind of activity since then. Movers had to be found. The dog had to be made EU import-ready. Apartment and car hunts needed to be launched. A new language learned (well it’s not new for Christian). Furniture bought. Jobs given notice. Ayi given notice. Adoption agency and home study guy given notice. Things given away. Friends bid farewell…

As of now, we’re in the final stretch with one month left in China (our stuff leaves on the slow boat in two weeks). As we get closer to the day of departure, loose ends actually are getting tied up and what once seemed like a Herculean effort is proving doable by mere mortals.

As part of our move, this website is also going to be changing with the hopes that without any silly things like real jobs to distract me, I’ll be better about updating it.

Next stop, Dornbirn, Austria!

On the whole, Thai massages are fabulous. I had one truly disappointing massage, which is a pretty good average, I find, as I’m rather picky about my massages. The best one I had was on our last day, in Bangkok. The masseuse bent her head in a silent prayer before beginning the massage, and the gods apparently heard her out, as it ranked among the best I’ve had. Thai massage involves a combination of rubbing, poking, and bending (the bending is very similar to yoga postures), and this woman knew exactly how to align body parts to get the most out of each action (without breaking my back).

It’s a little disappointing to have gone through that and then come back home to the rubbing and pounding of Chinese massage. Though I suppose after a few, I won’t mind so much anymore as any massage is better than none at all.

Well, after two weeks in Thailand, I must tell you that Thai food in Thailand tastes remarkably like Thai food in Seattle… or Denver… or Feldkirch, Austria. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still delicious (it is Thai after all), but it ain’t no Sichuan.

What is fabulous about Thailand, though, is the street food. Once I discovered it, I used every eating opportunity I had to order a papaya salad from any street vendor I could find. Freaking fantastic! I haven’t been this excited about a street food find since liang pir. Between Papaya salad and freshly made coconut ice cream, I think I could happily exist for the rest of my life with nothing else. Christian, for his part, fell in love with another Northern Thai concoction, Khao Soi, which consists of egg noodles in a thick coconut curry soup, laden with chicken, and topped with crunchy fried noodles. He was also a fan of Thai iced tea (consisting of tea, sugar, and condensed milk… Thailand must be what keeps Nestle in business with all the condensed milk they used in their tea and coffee).

Some of the most surprisingly amazing things we ran across, though, weren’t even Thai. I had the best Palak Paneer of my life in a little Thai-Indian restaurant right by the Night Market in Chiang Mai. I also came into an absolutely brilliant banana-coconut-ginger smoothie, which was just heaven on earth (as was the organic fruit and yogurt I was eating it with). And then there was this great feta-spinach wrap in a whole wheat tortilla that was so delicious, I’ve forgotten what Christian had at that meal (though I do remember that there were two monks at the restaurant). On Ko Samui, we came across some amazing seafood at a French-Thai fusion restaurant.

And then there were the bananas! There exist these little fat, ugly bananas in Thailand that are sweeter and more custardy and just better than any banana you have ever bought from the supermarket. One awesome dessert involved cutting them up and putting them in a soup of coconut milk, but they’re brilliant raw (and also fabulous in smoothies, which everyone in Thailand calls shakes for some reason).

So as far as I’m concerned, go to Thailand for the street food and the bananas, then grab a couple awesome foreign meals while you’re there. The Thai food might actually be overrated (though admittedly fifty times better than anything we can get in Dalian).

I arrived at Dalian airport shortly before 6:30am for an 8:00am flight. By the time I made it to the front of the only economy line open to check in half the airport’s morning flights, it was 7:00am, and the woman at the check in counter informed me in Chinese that check in for my flight had already closed. I don’t have the vocabulary in Chinese for “check in has already closed, you poor bastard and there’s no way I’m going to do anything to help you such as tell you where my supervisor is because I really, really want you to miss this flight, you spoiled American,” so there were a series of panicked phone calls to Christian and the ticket booking company (which was closed!), as well as some swearing at two separate agents both of whom refused to check me in for a reason I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t until I went to the trouble of asking for a representative who spoke English that I was directed to a manager and she explained what was going on and checked me in anyway. It was 7:10 am at this point, and the final boarding call was already being made on the loud speaker for my 8:00am flight.

Of course, all the lines at security were super long. Though one woman, seeing me utterly horrified, mentioned that it was okay for me to cut the line since my flight was being repeatedly announced and all that. So I did, and no one said anything about it. After security, I ran to my gate, dropping everything from the pockets of my coat twice before finally arriving, short of breath and in a daze, confused as to why the flight’s staff were giving me quizzical looks. They didn’t seemed to notice that they’d been doing “final boarding” calls for five minutes. The plane ended up taking off at 7:35am, though to the end all the schedules continued to say 8:00am.

Despite the inauspicious start, the rest of my day in Beijing was quite fabulous. I went to a wonderful Ashtanga class at Fine Yoga, I found an imported food store filled with such hard-to-find delicacies as sourdough bread starter and red lentils, and spent far too much time oggling the books in some tiny Foreign language bookstore (not the big one near Tiananmen). In fact, if not for the inconvenience of spending forty five minutes getting my fingerprints taken and turning in documents at the Embassy, the entire day could have very well been one marvelous birthday present (you’re not getting out of my birthday that easily, though, Christian, but if you do want to give me another day in Beijing…). Heck, even the embassy was pretty fun. The guards had a great time going poking around my yoga mat and the groceries I left at the front gate and the officers in charge of my fingerprints and taking oaths and what not were all pretty jovial.

After the embassy, I had to spend some time hunting down a suitable box so that I could check my groceries on the flight home as I was pretty sure Christian’s giant bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup (not to mention my much coveted bottle of wine) would be declared a liquid. That done, I still made it back to the airport with plenty of time to enjoy a leisurely dinner at the awesome Thai restaurant in Terminal 3 as well as a cup of (not-Starbucks) coffee afterward.

Then it was back home on an eight thirty flight and straight to bed with dreams of all the organic brown rice pasta I didn’t buy gnawing at my brain.

Bummer.

Unlike some of the other Consulates out there, like, say, the Guangzhou Consulate, which oversees all adoptions of Chinese orphans by American citizens, the Shenyang Consulate, wedged into a little barbed wire block with the Japanese Consulate, the Russian Consulate, and the North Korean Consulate, is a humble little place with a crazy amount of security.

Having learned my lesson on our two previous trips in the last two years, I pre-warned my dear consulate people that I would be arriving with a non-American. All of his information was entered into their little list. Still, when we arrived, we were greeted with a guard who glanced once at the Red cover on Christian’s passport and shook his head.

“He’s on the list,” I prompted. The guard when a step further by walking the passport inside the barbed fence to another guard inside the booth, who also shook his head.  The first guard returned with the passport and shook his head once more. “They know he’s coming today. He’s on the list,” I insisted.

Guard one eyed me hesitantly before returning to guard two, who now obviously annoyed that we weren’t leaving, finally decided to pull out a booklet that was presumably “the list,” shuffled through it without much interest, made some notes, and we were finally waved in. It was an inauspicious beginning to what was actually an okay visit.

We had two tasks to complete on this adventure. The first was we to notarize more than a dozen separate documents, mostly mundane things like birth certificates, tax forms and whatnot. The second task was to file a document asking the U.S. government for permission to adopt. As part of this petition, we also had to have our fingerprints taken for an FBI background check. Fairly straight forward stuff for the most part. However, the Shenyang Consulate had never dealt with filing a petition for an adoption from a country that isn’t China. Makes sense since we’re in China and all, but it’s really a bad sign when you expect to be able to file a document with a certain office and the person working there asks, “So how are you going to get this to the Immigration office? Are you going to mail it?”

A bad feeling crept up my spine as I nervously pointed out that I’d been on the State Department and USCIS’s website and was under the impression the consulate was equipped to handle our petition, steeling myself for what I felt must surely be the inevitable denial and an insistence that I call USCIS when I get home.

However, the lovely government worker did no such thing. Instead she offered up, “Huh. We’ve never done this before. Let me just call the USCIS office in Beijing and see if we can accept it.” This was the beginning of a three and a half hour learning experience for everyone. USCIS was consulted several times. Signatures and sworn statements were done as well as a course in proper fingerprinting. Those government officials could have oh-so-easily turned us away, but instead they were game for a new adventure into bureaucratic paperwork, and it was awesome.

So thank you my little consulate, you guys rock. Though you really ought to do something about that fellow in charge of your list to get in.

• We went to America. Saw Seattle and Bellingham in Washington, Portland and Corvallis in Oregon, Victoria in British Columbia (okay, so that’s Canada and not America), Denver (and surrounding cities) in Colorado, and Norfolk, VA. Nico fulfilled Christian’s goal for him to make it to ten countries before his first birthday.
• Nico started walking. This occurred the day after we arrived in America, at my mom’s house. My mom missed it as she was ordering Chinese food. At first Nico was pretty set on not repeating the performance, but over the past month, he’s gotten more and more comfortable and now lurches about like a drunken sailor.
• I turned 27. As was the case last year and the year before, I was sick for it. We did, however, eat some awesome Ethiopian food.
• My tv career began as my first episode aired. So far as I can tell, only Chinese people have seen it. Comments have run along the lines of, “You were drinking tea!”
• Negotiations have resumed over Nico’s lack of a sibling and rectifying that situation.
• Nico turned one with a giant birthday party, loads of presents, and three cakes.
• We became the proud owners of an espresso machine.