What we did on what was supposed to be the day before

I'm up early at 3:30 AM on Thursday--even earlier than my usual Chicago wake-up. We went to bed with no word about today, and at this point it seems unlikely that today is the day.

Peggy went to bed last night saying that she's all right with the delay, and I believe her.

As many of you know--and as I said at the start of the blog--the journey here to some degree began with the death of our premature infant son, Declan, three summers ago. It is hard, after that, not to worry always that something will go wrong.

But even with this delay, when Peggy was watching Lisa with her baby, I think she realizes that this is really going to happen.

We're so ready for this. At the same time, we have all the many worries--some silly, some serious, some real, some false--that anybody would have in our situation. Will we be good parents? Will we know how to take care of the baby? Will the babies be healthy? And then the fun questions: What will they be like? What will happen next?

We still have to tell you about Sa Pa. But that is an entry in itself.

Let me tell you about yesterday, which was supposed to be the "day before." We're so happy that other adoptive families seem to be following the blog. The blogs we read before were so helpful to us. On the one hand, maybe, you don't want to read about other people's experiences because you don't want to spoil the surprises. But even the things we knew about before we got here were still surprises. And maybe some of the practical stuff we're trying to narrate will be helpful.

Here's a picture from yesterday, which today becomes, unfortunately, all packed up and nowhere to go. We each have a baby backpack with two changes of clothes. We have six bottles to bring along. We have a container of formula and a two-liter bottle of water to mix with it. We will ask to keep the cloths Luc and Maisie are wearing from the orphanage, so we have some cloths to exchange--with some extras.

Then there are a dozen or so diapers for the G&R day and drive, and the diaper stuff--wipes (yes, we found them here finally). Finally, some toiler paper; we are told that in case we have to stop, the facilities along the road will be very basic.

Then we have a big duffle, where we have packed our two baby Bjorns. But mainly it is filled with the gifts. People have heard about the gifts. The Vietnam TravelTalk Yahoo group has been discussing them this week. There is an official list--including the people here in Vietnam, including World Child staff, who help with the adoption, and including the caregivers at the orphanage, with special cards for the primary caregivers. We basically made up small goody bags for the caregivers, in little party sacks. We've been told they really like American lotions and chocolate; we added chapstick and a few notecards. We spent some time yesterday assembling all that, filling bags.

We also have gifts for the birth mothers, who we will meet at the G&R. For us there are two, but no fathers, and from what we understand right now, the mothers are young and unwed. We bought gold necklaces with heart pendants for them. It was the hardest and saddest gift to buy. We give them so little and they will give us so much--and give up so much themselves. We've read at least one other blog that describes what seems to be the sadness of these mothers at the ceremony. We've talked about this here in our roup, and Marci says that she knows she will cry about this at the ceremony.

We also wanted to bring things for the other children at this orphanage, which includes older children. I wrote a note to a friend at the Chicago Marathon, and he supplied a bunch of Chicago Marathon baseball caps. We bought some bags of small chocolates, for them, as well. When Peggy's class raised money for the orphanage cribs, they had a bit more left, so her class will also "sponsor" a child at the orphanage. These are gifts for that child, who we hope to meet, to share with friends.

Just so you know, after seeing what Lisa brought to Thai Nguyen and seeing the luggage Marci brought from the U.S., we feel like we haven't been generous enough. Remember that big luggage pile at the airport? Apparently a lot of it was gifts for the orphanage--in our luggage, too, thankfully. We were just a little bit less ambitious in terms of what we thought we could carry here and to Lang Son. Marci and Lisa just didn't seem to care about that because they had things they wanted to give to the orphanages.

Of course, our gifts are fine--and we like the idea of Vietnamese boys and girls running around with Chicago Marathon hats. We weren't really trying to make up the deficit--and we really had planned this ahead of time, in conversation with Jenny from World Child--but yesterday we also bought some Vietnamese books to take to the orphanage. Apparently the Harry Potter collection in Vietnamese was a big hit there back when the first families came in October.

Which brings us to our other activity yesterday: shopping. We took three excursions, actually, over the course of the day.

First was a journey to "baby street," the street of store stalls where vendors sell baby goods--cloths, diapers, towels and layette, and all the basics. Yes, they have babies in Vietnam, and those parents need everything that we need. We were told correctly that you can get basically everything you need here when you arrive, with the exception of bottle liners for the American style drop in bottles. To be honest, I wasn't paying close attention, but I suspect you can even find that stuff (I'll check again on the next trip). The labels on these items are a bit confusing, of course, but many of them have English as well as Vietnamese. What's more, the packaging and brand names are often what we recognize. I suppose this raises the possibility of terrible disaster--you think you've bought diaper rash cream but it turns out you ware putting something else on your baby. But the point here is that you don't have to bring everything from home. What's more, it is not expensive.

Nearby to baby street, which I think is called Lan Ong street, by the way, is a street of vendors selling strollers. This isn't really stroller street, because these stores also have toys--many of them rolling toys--and other baby equipment, like the bouncers and saucers. We have not made the stroller plunge yet, but the price we were quoted was 300,000 dong--about $20 US. Peggy can't quite imagine trying to push a baby stroller across a street in Hanoi; we barely make it across alive ourselves. My idea is that we can carry the babies down to the lake, and then push them in the stroller there. We spend a lot of time walking around the lake, it seems--three times around yesterday, even. But we've held off on that purchase, in part because we would have to buy two of them. And since we didn't buy, we didn't take the next step--negotiating the price. We are terrible at this, but it is what you are supposed to do. We said the price was 300,000 dong--but it isn't. We are supposed to offer another price--as much as 50 percent off. The vendor will then counter. If we can get to 75 percent of the first price, we are doing well. Above that, the owner wins.

Suffice it to say, we seldom win. We seldom even negotiate. Maybe for the big item, like a stroller, we might try to get a few dollars off. But it just seems to us like we have the money, and the Vietnamese, for the most part, don't. Saving two dollars on a stroller is not a big deal to us--but for them it is probably a full meal on a family table. As you can see, we are feeling some American guilt as we walk around with a wallet full of money. This hit home for us more on the trip to Sa Pa. We will write about that, if you are interested, when we get the chance.

But in the meanwhile, we are shopping in Hanoi. We had also set out in the morning, in fact, to look for "baby cots." That's what the Vietnamese call cribs, apparently, as one of our internet adoptive friends, Meg, told us before we left. Our hotel charges $10 a night for a baby cot. We will probably need two, but we are still wondering if the babies can share one. But an alternative to the hotel charge would be to buy a crib. The question: Do the Vietnamese use "pac'n play" cribs/playpens? Peggy's sisten Kathy suggested we just bring one of hers and just leave it behind when we return. We were trying to pack light at the time. We didn't see any pac'n play cribs--or any baby cots at all--on baby street or in the stroller stores.

But as I have thought about it, I think we might go back there and try again. This time we'll ask, "Baby cots?" Maybe they have it in the back? We just figure that we will need a crib for ten days or so, and if we can get something for less than 150,000 dong, we come out ahead. The thought has also been that maybe we could leave it behind somehow for another family.

Just so you know, in our group we've been joking about the low-cost alternatives. The hotel rooms here at the Hong Ngoc don't really have dressers (another small detail), otherwise a dresser drawer might be a baby cot? We've also made Moses jokes that involve using baskets, which we presume we could find on basket street or wicker or ratan street somewhere.

At the same time, the babies have been sleeping on floor mats. I think we all want to get them into cribs as soon as we can.

I've been at this a while now. Just so you know, it is now 5:00 AM, our originally scheduled departure time for Lang Son--before the mysterious delay.

Where were we? Shopping....

To finish our excursion to baby street, let me admit that I got us a bit lost on the way--not lost, exactly, but our route was a bit round-about. The good thing is that no one can make fun of me for not asking for directions on the street, because we wouldn't understand the answer.

Our second excursion of the day was with Marci and her daughter, Katie. We forgot to bring pictures of the babies to give the caregivers, but I have them on a flash drive and we went out to print them at a photo store. Marci, meanwhile, brought a big camera lens with her for her digital Nikon, thinking she wanted to shoot a lot of the scenery. Problem is, that lens isn't so good at close quarters taking pictures of the events of people, as she discovered in Sa Pa. So she wanted to buy another lens for close quarters.

We walked the circumfrance of Hoan Kiem Lake, again, visiting ten different camera and photo shops. I was able to get my prints ordered. Marci had a harder time. No one even sold lenses separately for her camera. Finally, near the end of the trip around, she found a guy with just one small case of cameras on the sidewalk who was willing to sell her a 35-70 zoom off a camera. He wanted $100. Marci tried to negotiate. I think she suggested $80. He just laughed, shook his head, and really $100. "Already low," he said, waving a flat hand. "Not $120." We told him we might be back.

That's another part of the negotiating instructins we've been given. You don't tell them you are going to get a better price somewhere else, American style. "Don't say that," Martin told us when I discussed negotiating skills with him. I think it is rude, maybe? You just say, you might come back later. Everyone knows what that means.

It turns out we didn't come back, though. Almost all the way around the lake, we found a store full of used and new cameras and lenses. Marci even negotiated. The first price was $150. She got it for $140--a 50-55mm macro lens, I think, with a big wide angle option.

After the camera store we stopped at Intimex, the grocery store. We'd already been there to buy formula and some other things, including a giant bottle of water. We decided to get a smaller bottle to take to Lang Son, and we needed a container to take some formula from the big can. Marci needed a few things, too.

The strange part was that the power had apparently gone out. We're not sure whether it was the block, or the store building, or the area. Our hotel had had an outtage in the morning, too. The Intimex store didn't close. Instead, the cashiers had account books out and they hand wrote down the items and the prices, then used calculators to total. We stood in line, in the dark, for a long time.

Our final excursion was coupled with dinner at a Pho restaurant. We went to a chain restaurant by the lake, Pho 24, with 24 different kinds of noodles, meat, and soup. I ate my first bowl of Pho at Sa Pa, for breakfast. Peggy and I each got a big bowl, she got a smoothie drink, and I got a Halida Vietnamese beer for 99 dong total--about $7 US. The food came in three minutes, so this is basically Vietnamese fast food--cheap and fast! It is also way better than McDonalds.

After our Pho, we investigated a big building at the bottom of the lake which we had passed a bunch of times. It had a scrolling marquis, which said some things in Vietnamese, but also, "Welcome to the Plaza." There were lots of lights. And inside we found the Mall.

The bottom floors had fancy shops, Pierre Cardin, luggage, cosmetics. But on the fourth floor, up a series of escalators (there is also an elevator), we found a combination grocery store/department store. We don't even know what it is called--maybe the Citimart? It wasn't mentioned in our Rough Guide to Vietnam. Basically, it is a Super Walmart, without the size and variety. It was a really a combination between an old IGA or A&P and a Woolworth's, for those of you who remember.

Peggy was surprisingly at home. In our instructions about what to bring from those who had come before, we had been told that we would probably want to bring our own baby cloths. But there were a lot of cloths on baby street. And here in the Plaza Citmart, there were a lot of cloths and they were really, really cheap. They do make a lot of American baby cloths in Vietnam for export, it seems, and some of them apparently end up staying here. They had Mickey Mouse things and Winnie the pooh. We have drawers full of baby cloths back home in Chicago, but of course Peggy started looking through these things. I pointed out that it was cheap, yes, but it is not Gap or Old Navy or even Target cloths. "But these cloths are Vietnamese," she insisted, "and so are the babies. We could have brought them home in Vietnamese cloths!"

That seems a good place to end this. We bought only a few things--like two matching hats with cat faces and whiskers, each for 12,000 dong (less than a dollar). We saw all the baby products we brought from home, including Johnson's baby shampoo, diapers, and baby wipes. They had baby tubs, and we might return for one those. You get the idea...

Now all we need are the babies!