Huffman Coding

For our last night in Chongqing we ate at Pizza Hut. They have a quite varied menu here (New Orleans pasta, anyone?) but the spicy Schezwan lunch we had earlier in the day was much better.

We ran across a huge market that catered to women last night with hundreds of small shops each perhaps one meter wide and two meters deep. Half of them were selling jeweled iPhone cases the other half were selling ladies undergarments. I doubt any male was in the BedazzleMart willingly. I sure wasn’t. Katie bought a cell phone charm and I escaped across the street to the local electronics store for some AA batteries.

We headed back to the hotel for an ice cream nightcap. We regretted it immediately because the mint sherbert tasted like Tums. Each night the exterior lights of the hotel flashed across our large room window in what I assume was a discernable pattern when viewed from outside of the hotel, but it was just annoying from within. We checked out of the hotel this morning.

According to our guide, the city of Chongqing is shaped like a duck and it takes 8 hours to get from one side of the city to the other by car, so I was surprised to discover that it only takes 2.5 hours to get to Chengdu where we will rejoin the group.

Windy took us to the train station and got us through the security checkpoint. They wanded Windy, Chris and me but they waved the girls on. Katie immediately asked me why she and Claire weren’t scanned and I said it was because she and her sister looked like they couldn’t hurt a fly. Claire, oblivious to the colloquialism, took umbrage: “Oh yes, we could!”

A couple of fine, young gentlemen helped lift a couple of our considerable bags onto the rack above our seats on the bullet train. The lady behind Chris must have been from Belgium because she was quite phlegmmish, hocking up massive amounts of sputum every few minutes. Loudly. The train traveled between 165 and 200 km/h between the two cities, and the spitting eventually stopped.

The girls on the bullet train

Our new guide in Chengdu is Alice, another pleasant young lady. She is the “Sporty Spice” to Windy’s “Posh Spice.”

Chengdu seems very nice; a quaint city of only 9 million, the smallest we’ve been to so far. Although Alice says the city is overcast on average 280 days of the year, our first day here has had beautiful blue skies.

Our guide took us to a great restaurant for lunch and the food was great. Our hotel is beautiful. It, like the one in Chongqing, has a room closet with a lock box, a scale, and his & her bathrobes and gas masks.

Must be a Schezwan province thing.

This is a geeky post, so those with a life can choose to skip it.

The SD card for one of our two cameras filled up and needed to be transferred to my netbook. Claire has been taking pictures of toilets, clouds, stray dogs and lots of pictures of herself from arms length. It also had pictures of Claire at her founding location.

I’ve brought along an Ubuntu netbook that has a little bit of flash storage and its own, much larger SD card. Unfortunately it only has one SD slot, so it is a two step process moving the images from the camera’s card to netbook’s limited flash storage then moving them onto the larger card after swapping it in.

I had no problem copying the pictures from the first card to the temporary directory on the netbook, but it wouldn’t let me safely remove (unmount) the camera’s card after deleting the pictures from it. It said the card was still in use by the user interface (nautilus).

A simple way to resolve this issue is to reboot the computer and safely swap the SD cards afterward. It would just take a few seconds.

Unfortunately after rebooting, the newly copied files had been deleted from the netbook as well. I had chosen the operating system’s temporary directory and, because I am used to much older flavors of UNIX and Linux which do not do so, I did not expect that Ubuntu would wipe that location (/tmp) upon reboot. Good to know. Both the original and backup copies of the irreplaceable photos were gone. Bad to know.

Ashen, I confessed to my wife the unfolding tragedy. She was stoic, but I could tell she wasn’t happy. I quickly googled for directions for recovering the files from the netbook directory. All of links said that files were unrecoverable from the netbook’s new-fangled, secure (EXT3) filesystem. No hope of recovery.

It was then that I put my head down into my hands and started quietly muttering words I hope daughters didn’t hear.

After several agonizing moments, it dawned on me that the SD card used the old, insecure Microsoft filesystem format (FAT16). A little more googling and I found a Linux utility that could recover those deleted images. After a fretful hour watching the utility analyze the SD card, all the files were recovered onto the netbook and could be moved onto the larger card for safe keeping.

Panic over. Marriage intact.

We’re missing the breakfasts we had in Beijing. The food was a mixture of Western and Asian and we got to dine with many families with adopted Chinese daughters even those not in our group. And nattily dressed pilots and flight attendants. Here in Chongqing, we have traditional Chinese breakfast foods, including congee and a few types of fried pumpkin. There was a square metal drink dispenser with a picture of an orange on it, so I assumed it was orange juice, but milk came out when I pressed the lever.  That isn’t bad to have with my not-quite-french-toast, so I was okay with it. But I was wrong when I got back to our table: it was milk with orange juice in it. Shudder.

With our guide, we took a 1.5 hour van ride out in the rain to the orphanage in Fuling, the city where Claire spent the first 10 months of her life. The traffic rules in central China are less refined shall we say than in Beijing. Apparent honking your horn at any time gives you the right of way to cut in front of other cars and pedestrians.

Like Chongqing, Fuling is quite a bit different than it was eight years ago. The terraced farmland on the mountainsides between the two cities has all but disappeared. The farmers that remain sell their produce in the berm of the freeway along our route. A elevated monorail track is now being constructed adjacent to the freeway.

The Fuling orphanage was relocated to the top of the mountain two years ago. It was there that we met the new Social Welfare director who showed us a couple of rooms with some of the 100 children who reside there. The first room had about 15 children all under one year old. Except for one or two, all were special needs children of varying degrees. Some with heart or brain conditions, but mostly they were children with cleft palates. The younger infants were pre-surgery, the older infants were post-surgery and were likely to get adopted soon. All of the children were flat on their backs in their cribs and none of them, include the ones around a year old, were sitting up or attempting to do so. None of children were held while we were there.

Claire, Katie and our guide Windy in the Fuling Nursery

The second room had about a dozen older children perhaps all under the age of six or seven and, again, they were almost exclusively special needs. Mostly limb deformities but one girl had downs. They were spread across a padded gym mat in an otherwise sparse room. I didn’t see any child playing with toys or anywhere near the plastic playground equipment down the hall.

The final room we visited was a library with all the post-placement reports displayed on shelves. Bookshelf after bookshelf of reports and photo books of proud parents with their children in their permanent family setting. By dumb luck, we found two reports we had sent to the orphanage with pictures of Claire years back. We saw another photo album with the children of other families who adopted along with us: Hannah and Roxanne. All very happy pictures, but I saw no photos of children with Chinese parents.

Katie and Claire looking at one of her Post Placement Reports

We then rode down the mountain to the old Fuling orphanage where Claire was cared for. We recognized the courtyard and rooms immediately.

It is now a private kindergarten facility for 500 to 600 kids. Because it was summer break, the place was desolate with nary a child in sight. Gone were the dozens of cribs from eight years ago. Gone were the bouncy walkers that rolled across the floor with infants stretching their legs and grabbing for your hand. Also gone was the pot of boiling vinegar near the door to cut the smell of full diapers.

I was hoping these visits would have piqued Claire’s curiosity about the first year of her life but it did not. It was Katie who was peppering me with questions in the back seat of van as we drove the director and her son to our lunch spot. Although she has been aware of it all for years, Katie was trying to reconcile for the first time the relationship between China’s one child policy, the patriarchal society and the illegality of abandoning children. I think Katie was finally letting go of some misplaced guilt for having been left along the side of the road. My girl wears her heart on her sleeve.

We finished up the day at the spot where Claire was found and reported to the police nine years ago: a steep alleyway that has been partially torn down. Although I normally loathe when Claire absconds with rocks from playgrounds and parking lots around home, we encouraged Claire to grab a rock from the rubble pile a few feet from where her journey to our family began.

Claire at her Founding Site

I asked Claire what her favorite part of China was so far and she said it was her new buddy, another daughter in our group. We have separated from her and the others and today just our family traveled to Chongqing, a large city in central China, in the province of Claire’s orphanage.

We checked out of the Beijing hotel and paid for the laundry service we used a few days earlier. $90 to wash a handful of items. Perhaps we should have purchased an armload of $1 T-shirts back at the Great Wall.

In the hotel lobby, a woman from Tucson, Arizona approached us and mentioned that she and her husband did the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure too. She had recognized my 8-year-old GOBA T-shirt from half a world away.

As we waited to for the van to take us to the airport she asked “Do they have squat toilets on the plane?” Traditional Chinese toilets are just a basin flush (no pun intended) to the floor; you spread you legs and squat to relieve yourself. I imagine that would be difficult in a plane’s confined lavatory.

As we boarded the plane, they offered a newspaper for us to read. Claire grabbed the Shanghai Securities News to look at, although I’m pretty sure she realized China’s leading financial newspaper was written entirely in Mandarin.

Each new city brings a new local tour guide. In Chongqing, we were met by Windy, a comely young lady with big blue eyes courtesy of Bausch and Lomb. Her English is excellent. I joked that it was better than mine after she came up with an English word that had escaped me for a moment. She helped us check into the hotel and she helped the hotel receptionist exchange our money. They don’t get many foreigners here and receptionist was not familiar with the process. We’re getting a few more stares when we walk the street than we did in Beijing.

His and her gas masks in the hotel room closet

Chongqing is a huge city, five times bigger in area than Beijing and greater in population. Very different than it was eight years ago. It is built in a very mountainous area and it is very hot, humid and smoggy. Today it was 89 degrees; the day before we arrived it was 104. And this is the month before the peak summer season. There are no bikes in this city because it so hilly, but they do have shirtless “Stick Men” who loiter the streets with bamboo sticks and can be hired to carry items, like groceries, up and down the street for you. Something to think about if my software assignments dry up back home.

We’ve been eating local food for awhile now, but we broke down and McDonald’s comfort food for dinner. Chris ordered off the laminated picture menu they have for those who don’t speak Mandarin or the local Sichuanese dialect, which is apparently very different. We had Italian gelato down the street afterward.

Yes, you read that right. Americans in China eating an Italian dessert.

Yesterday’s post was late because the Internet connection last night at the hotel was especially incorrigible. So I woke up at 4:30 to compose and post it. Yes you can jump to the conclusion that I’m still trying to get used to the timezone difference.

Today started with a trip to Tiananmen Square. It was another hot, overcast day in Beijing and the square was quite crowded. Quite a contrast from when we adopted Claire 8 years ago and the place was frigid and deserted. The revisionist history has clearly taken hold, as our guide, Mr. Woo, expressed sadness about the soldiers who died there. He was only eight at the time so goes by what he was told.

Claire and Katie flanking their best buddies, Emilie and Josie, in Tiananmen Square

Mr. Woo does, however, know the dimensions of every historical landmark in Beijing. The square is a 500 meters by 800 meter rectangle as we were told twice. Since July 1st was the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, there was a large temporary statue commemorating it. One of our fellow touring couples brought along their birth sons with their daughter. The eldest son is a very tall (6’2″+), good looking blonde lad and a handful of Chinese teenage girls wanted to have their picture taken with him as we walked from one end of the square to the other.

The 600 year old Forbidden City sits at the north end of Tiananmen Square, so we did a two-fer. As we walked through the ancient city, our guide rattled off more measurements from memory (he’s been doing this for five years), but we didn’t lead us into any of the buildings. I wouldn’t have minded some of the latter to go with the former.

The common folk were not allowed in the Forbidden City, but the story goes that one could hope to contact the emperor by writing grievances on a kite and flying it near the walled city. When an opportune wind arose, one would then cut the string and the kite would land within the walls and, perhaps, be redressed. Because of this, one should not pick up a kite for fear of acquiring the bad luck of the original owner. So perhaps “go fly a kite” isn’t a brush off in China.

We visited the Temple of Heaven in the afternoon. More dimensions and explanations of the significance of the number of pillars in the main temple ensued. Still, the guide didn’t take us into any of the buildings.

Our last stop was at a beautiful public park with gardens, ponds with lilies and lotus flowers, and a pagoda. Various shirtless, middle-aged men were playing cards and wagering or fishing next to the “no fishing” sign. At the edge of the park was a tacky little corner with carny rides for toddlers which held the girls interest for a half hour.

Carny Ride at the Park

At dinner, we were split again into an adults table and a kids table. There was a debate at the adults table as to whether anyone should eat the uncooked cabbage for fear of being exposed to the local tap water. Paranoia won out and the word went out to the kids table that they should avoid the salad.

As of tonight, we are the only ones still in the Beijing hotel. Shortly after dinner we took a van back to the hotel while the others took the larger tour bus to the train station overnight to visit the terracotta warriors in Shaanxi province. Meanwhile our family is checking out early tomorrow morning and flying to Chongqing to visit Claire’s orphanage the following day. Stay tuned.

Happy fourth of July everyone. We celebrated by Skyping our oldest daughter while she held up her cell phone up to the webcam and played a video that she had recorded of the fireworks at her grandmother’s the night before. It was just like we were there. Not.

This was another full day of sightseeing. Our first stop on the way out of Beijing was at China Beijing National Stone Place in the Sand River Town Industrial City. I’m pretty sure that there are some sort of prearranged financial relationships between our tour company and these upscale shopping establishments that we stop at, but it was nice looking at pretty jade for a hour. Too bad we were there for more than that. Katie and I scoured the large store looking for the most expensive item: A 880000 yuan (US$140,000) carving of an apple tree. We did get three little jade animals for the girls for a bit less.

The Great Wall is no longer contiguous. The sections that were built 2000 years ago are gone, so we toured a section in Mutianyu that was built a mere 600 years ago. Unlike the wall in Badaling we visited 8 years ago, this section had a cable car that took you up to the wall from halfway up the mountain, but there was a precipitous walk from the tour bus to even get to the base. Chris stopped when she reached the Wall adjacent to the cable cab exit at the top, while I took Katie and Claire through a handful of sentry towers built into the wall.

Great Wall

As expected, there was a continuous stream of kiosks selling crapware at the cable car base exit. We had a steep pathway to walk down, at sometimes only three feet wide, while you were barked at from both sides to buy something. Stuffed pandas, t-shirts, plastic swords, they all sold the same stuff, so they all tried to make it up in volume: The volume of their voice. I tried not to cringe each time Chris stopped to look at fans for the girls. And yes, we got taken. One of the fans purchased another parent came unglued the minute we got back on the bus.

Our group lunch was a glass restaurant down the mountain in a nice green house setting. The eleven youngest daughters sat one large table while the other thirteen of us sat at an adjacent table. Our drinking glasses, as in every restaurant we’ve visited so far, have been a TSA-approved 3-ounce capacity, with no refills. Beer, regular Coke, and regular Sprite. Never diet and no bottled water. Most of the time I choose beer just to avoid coating my teeth with sugar.

Claire has made a buddy and they swam with most of the other young girls when we got back to hotel. They held hands when went to dinner and they’ve held singing contests on the bus whenever they could find someone else to be a judge. Claire massacred Rolling in the Deep and Jingle Bell Rock.

Our group again split into young and old tables for dinner. Halfway though the meal the girls were bouncing between tables looking for more soda to drink with the spicy food when our tour guide came to the rescue with a two-liter bottle. The restaurant was a 150-year-old, 24-hour, 3-storey establishment famous for its Peking Duck, which of course, we had to have because this was the last evening (for everyone but us) in Beijing.

Color me surprised. The sun is out in Beijing and you could see a sky that was actually blue.

We are travelling off-and-on with 5 other families with adopted daughters. We meet each other after breakfast and I managed to forget every other parents’ names almost immediately. (I’m horrible at that.)

Our first tour bus first stop was at the Summer Palace. A beautiful 726 acres with gardens and lakes. Princess Cixi possessed a marble boat permanently moored to its shores. Described as an “Imperial retreat from Beijing’s summer heat” on our map, it was still quite hot on this day. And, at least for today, there were five elderly Chinese gentlemen playing polka music in one of the gazebos.

Summer Palace

Afterward, we drove by the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium and the Cube aquatic center which is now a water park. It was adjacent to a large hotel whose towers loosely resembled the humps of a dragon. I don’t know the exchange rate between that hotel’s “Chinese 7-star” rating and the western star rating of hotels, but it did look nice.

We next visited the Derun Jewelry store across the street, housed under the bleachers of the National Olympic Sports Center Stadium. While it was a odd place to put a retail store, the place had a very nice selection of pearl jewelry with necklaces upwards of US $30,000. The girls got to string their own mother of pearl necklaces for free. Nothing like manual labor to teach them the value of a dollar yuan.

Necklace Making

To give the girls a feel for typical Chinese life, we took pedicabs to a local family’s Hutong home for lunch. As Claire and I were ridden through the ancient alleyways, she reported that we should do the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure this way in the future, with me pedaling the single speed pedicab and her resting in the padded back with a canopy overhead. The brake was a cable running the length of the frame which he stomped down on with his foot to slow the vehicle down. It didn’t seem too effective as we ran into Chris’s pedicab at least once.

The authentic Chinese lunch was delicious and varied and the patriarch kept filling my cup with Yanjing Beer as we ate. The place was cozy with just three 10×10′ rooms, but it seemed very nice by Hutong standards. It had a room air conditioner and flat screen TV. The father introduced himself and shared with us his collection of pets: a dog, crickets and grasshoppers. (This spooked some of the wives and daughters at the dinner table, including my own.) He also brought out several newspaper clippings and magazines that showed that his dog and crickets were prize-winning. They certainly were large enough. After dinner the eleven girls in our group made small kites to take home.

I pointed out to Katie that had she not been adopted by us, she might have been raised in home similar to this one. I think she’s still mulling that over.

In the evening we were one of two families that attended a performance of the Acrobatics Legend of Jinsha. it was open seating, but we got a decent view from the side where we able to read the theatre rules before the performance on an LED screen hung above the stage. One of the rules: “Do not throw peel and waste paper tithin [sic] the thiatre [sic].” Apparently it wasn’t obvious that the place shouldn’t be trashed.

After listening to a few songs off Adele’s latest album, the show was a pleasant, hour-long variety act that included jugglers, balancing acts and ended with five motorcycles riding the interior of a spherical cage.

Maybe this would have been a career choice for Katie had she stayed in China.

When the tour company laid out the daily activities, they designated the day after our arriving flight as “sightseeing on our own.” This was a polite way of saying they weren’t going bother with a tour guide when they knew we were just going to fall asleep in the middle of the day anyway due to jet lag.

We did try valiantly at first. We woke up at 4:30am and then waited two hours for the breakfast buffet to open at the hotel. It was lovely. By 7:30, the girls were splashing in the hotel’s pool. It was lovely too.

We left the hotel mid-morning to go sightseeing. The map available to us has landmarks, but no names on any of the streets. It would make little sense to put them on the map because it would be impossible for us to decipher the ideographs anyway. We also could not get our bearings by the sun. The city is muggy and the sky is perpetually ashen think with smog, so there is no way to determine the position of the sun at any time.

Chris had determined that nothing was within walking distance except for shopping. The girls’ stomachs were sufficiently jet lagged, that we gave them Häagen Dazs before lunch. We walked a nice, wide pedestrian street surrounded on either side by malls and street vendors. We passed by a couple of dancing water fountains. I like the one that was choreographed to classic music better than the one with easy-listening music a half block down.

It is easy to save money when shopping in China. Katie was enamored with a fake jade bracelet and I got a chuckle over some tacky corrugated 3D posters of horses, bunnies, Chairman Mao, and Scarlett Johansson. When Chris or I showed even the slightest interest in anything with a glance or a finger point, be it at a mall or a trinket from a street vendor, a saleswoman would immediately appear next to us and pre-fondle the item before handing it over to us and stare while we examined the item ourselves. She would then hand us similar items of her choosing to examine. I know they are just trying to be helpful, but Chris and I were so off-put by this invasive sales approach that our wallet stayed in our pocket and we saved the money. This happened every time we paused to browse. It didn’t help that the salespeople always outnumbered the shoppers. Just to be safe we expressed no interest in the scorpion shish kabob on “Food Street.” My normally quite independent Claire, reached out for my hand when we walked that alleyway.

Statue on Food Street

Although I believe it is not an issue in our current city of Beijing, Chris has warned the girls not to drink tap water for fear of Chairman Mao’s Revenge. Katie has taken this to heart and every other conversation is morning was about worms. I told the girls if I heard one more word about worms, I’d make the daughter who brought up the topic eat a scorpion. The next topic was “How do animals itch?”

We crashed mid-day and took a nap back at the hotel. Mid-afternoon, Claire announced “I’m hungry but I don’t want a scorpion” so we ate at Babela’s Kitchen in the Sun Dang An mall mostly because it had a huge picture menu and we could order by number. (Some of those numbers were in the nine thousands.)  Still more Western food, but I’m hoping the girls will get more native as the vacation progresses.

The day began yesterday Thursday at 4:30am; it is now 8:30pm Friday and the rest of my family just went to bed. Even accounting for the 12 hours lost due to the time change, I calculate I’ve been awake for 27 of the past 28 hours. Perfect time for me to write my thoughts for the start of the trip. I’ve got about 30 minutes of lucidity left in the tank.

First off, a 5 hour layover after a 48 minute flight does seem to be, in hindsight, illogical. It wouldn’t have been so bad except O’Hare has absolutely no power outlets on Concourse C. My smart phone battery was exhausted after answering work emails. So much for playing Strategery on the plane.

The plane for the overseas flight didn’t have seatback LCD screens (which I believe is now, or at least should be, part of the Geneva Conventions) so there weren’t many options for entertainment. The movies promised in the in-flight magazine did not show on the 12 inch screen 10 feet away because the airline had switched to a new set of movies ahead of the end of the month. I had not heard of Win Win and I wasn’t interested in Jane Eyre although the latter starred Mara Rooney from the Social Network and she looks interesting in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trailer. Is it me, or do you think that actress is trying really hard to avoid being typecast? I appear to be digressing. (My minutes of lucidity appear to be waning.)

Someone had given the lady behind me a last-generation iPod nano for her trip and she didn’t know how to use it. Her music was coming out of its built in speakers even though she had her headphones plugged in. She was trying to swipe the two-inch screen instead of using the scroll wheel right below it to navigate through its settings. Unfortunately I wasn’t positioned where I could help explain it to her. Nevertheless, she did finally figure it out on her own.

Her overhead vent was aimed at my head as I was trying to sleep. When I got cold enough, I discreetly reached up and re-aimed it more toward her. Awhile later I realized it was pointed back at my head again. Turns out she didn’t know how to turn the overhead vent off either so she just aimed it at someone else. I was able to help her out with that one. I just screwed it closed when we both realized neither of us wanted the cold air.

I sat next to Claire and there was a great deal of turbulence which probably prevented her from spotting Santa’s castle at the North Pole as we passed over the Arctic circle. The window shade did go up and down often during the flight.

Claire managed to spill her first Sprite down her pants before finishing it. In the process of helping her dry up, I managed to pour the remainder of the can on my seat and jeans. We also swapped meals because the stir fry and rice wasn’t as nice as I had anticipated and she didn’t like the seasoned mashed potatoes. Like every amateur comedian, Claire now realizes she hates airplane food. She ate very little of her meals (not even the brownie or cookie desserts), but made it up by drinking every Sprite she was offered.  I warned the lady in the aisle seat ahead of time that Claire had a tiny bladder.  More than a half dozen times she climbed over the gracious, Kindle-reading Loyola graduate to head to the back of the plane.

When we landed, we headed off to McDonald’s for some comfort food to fill her stomach.

I’m back from the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure. I took Claire for the first half of last week on the tandem, then I took Katie for the second half. Marissa, who lost interest in cycling years ago, stayed home.  I’m now home for four days, just enough time to mow the lawn and pack, then most of the family is off to China. Marissa is staying home for this vacation too. Grandma and our security attack cat will keep her company.

We leave Thursday (6/30) morning and lose a day due to the time change and jet lag. We’ll be in Beijing for several days with the rest of our tour group of five(?) families. We split off from them the following Wednesday (7/6) to fly to Claire’s orphanage in Fuling. At the end of the week (7/8), we’ll take a train to Chengdu and rejoin the others. Spoiler alert: panda pictures may be posted.

A train on the following Tuesday (7/12) will take us to Guangzhou, the city where all international adoptions are completed. We end the tour after a trip to Katie’s orphanage in Maoming (7/14). We fly back on Sunday (7/17). I will be a walking zombie at work Monday because our flight gets in at midnight, if it is even on time.