Day Two with Calie

Hey Grace, the last photo is for you!  If you'll notice, she is wearing a Philadelphia shirt!  I told her, her Jie Jie (older sister) goes to college in Philadelphia. "OH!" she said. I don't think she knew what her shirt said before I told her.  

Today was fun!  Started with a skype chat with my family back home, then lunch with friends here in Taiwan, Brandon and Lidia Chang.  We went to a famous Japanese buffet called "Shin Yeh".  It was very good and we had a good time together.  We forgot to take a picture at the restaurant, so no photo of that, sorry!

Later, after they dropped me off, I went to one of the millions of 7 Elevens here in Taiwan to buy Calie dry noodles for dinner.  That's what she requested.  So, after showing the clerk the name she had written down for me, I picked up the noodles and a drink for her and headed over to NRCH.

Today we had the entire time, about 2 hours, all to ourselves.  After a greeting of big hugs, they left us in a room together with an electronic handheld translator and closed the door.  I'm really glad I brought some posters to color!  She loved the posters and we tried using the translator to talk to each other.  We decided rather quickly the translator wasn't much good at translating either way, and gave it the thumbs down.  We did much better with charades!  The translator turned out to be good for games, however,  We played on that for a bit together and then she found the drawing program.  It had a little stylus with it and she drew a heart on the screen and wrote, in English, "I love you".    The time flew by!  She never even ate her noodles.

When our time was up, I walked back to the main gate and there were quite a few boys and a couple of women there.  The boys started to try out their English skills on me and I answered when they said something I could understand.  Calie had gone back to her room to put the posters there.  She came running back to me, and then the boys wanted to know how I knew her.  The woman standing there had some decent English, so I was able to get them to understand that I was going to be her MaMa.  The woman was all excited about this, as were the boys.  The woman, who knew Calie, gave her a hug and said something to her in Mandarin.  Whatever she said, Calie was really proud.  She got a big smile on her face and shook her head yes, back to the comment.  The boys all seemed very interested, but somewhat jealous, as I was warned they might be.  Then, however, the woman started asking about our family and I told her Calie would have two older sisters and an older brother.  I tried to explain that Cameron was gettig married, but she didn't have enough English to understand this. 

The guard had called a taxi for me, and while we were standing there, the garbage truck came.  The garbage truck, sounded like an ice cream truck.  It plays happy music and then I witnessed the funniest thing, everyone, literally everyone, started walking out of the buildings and throwing their garbage bags in the back of the truck.  I've never seen anything like it.  The garbage truck calls the people to bring out their garbage.  My taxi was right behind the garbage truck, so it took us a bit to leave.  Calie gave me more hugs and said goodbye.  I jumped in the taxi and we followed it down the road, as more people came out of their homes with garbage bags.  The taxi driver was clearly upset about the delay.  Haha it was quite funny.

I'm back in my room now.  I broke down and went to the McDonalds across the street for dinner.  It took me multiple trys to get salt for my fries, and I was the entertainment!  They kept giving me packets of things, pepper, sugar, sweet and sour sauce and I kept saying "no" and trying to make salt shaker motions.  That got great laughs!  Finally, he gave me a white packet that looked like sugar, but I took it and said "maybe"?  They must not put salt on their fries, but I was successful!  It was salt. 

The other photos I posted are of the sitting area in front of Starbucks (I visit daily), the scooters that are everywhere and the other photo is her orphange grounds - Northern Region Children's Home.  The building near the top left of the photo is the building I have been meeting with her in.  I'm standing at the front gate taking the photo and to the right of the photo is the playground area.

Until tomorrow - Zaijian!  (Good bye in Mandarin)