Day 6: Orphanage Visit & Nanjing Museum

The next morning we hit the buffet again and headed to the orphanage. We were slightly concerned about this since we had bonded well and weren’t sure how Bailor would react to seeing the other kids and the nannies again. Overall it went well. We finally got to see that muticolor puzzle piece floored room we had seen so much of in pictures. We saw some of the kids we recognized in Bailor’s videos too. The orphanage staff was even nice enough to allow Mackenzie to take some pictures of kids that were going to be adopted by people on the Facebook group Mackenzie was a part of. When we did have to leave Bailor did cry, but a lollipop later he was back in our good graces. Before we left we got our picture in front of the orphanage with the assistant orphanage director and most interesting we got to see the safe room attached to the orphanage where mothers can safely abandon their babies. This is where Bailor was found and they showed us a newspaper article showing Bailor as the first child found there after it was installed. We also got a more in depth journal and more answers from his nannies and a thumbdrive of additional pictures which was great.

From there we visited the Nanjing Museum to learn more about the culture. It was great because it was air conditioned! Bailor did pretty well in the stroller, too!
 After that we went back to the hotel to prepare for the next days in country flight from Nanjing City to Guangzhou where the US Embassy is and where we would finalize the processes to get Bailors visa to get out of the country and become a US citizen once he hit US soil. We received his passport that afternoon for this flight. Now at this point China is very sweaty so we were running out of clothes. There wasn’t a good option for a laundromat so we tried a trick that Mackenzie learned in her travels in Europe with People to People where you wash your clothes in a sink using a tide pod. This was on a much grander scale as we were washing pretty much all our clothes for both of us. I want you to imagine me in the hotel rolly desk chair switching off agitating the clothes in the bath tub watching Zootopia on the iPad as I switched off after each arm grew more tired (the shoehorn in the hotel didn’t quite work :-) ) After this was quite done we did our best to use the hotel towels to dry the clothes by layering them between the towels and rolling them. Then I used about every method of hanging to cover our room. The problem was no real airflow and the small hairdryer was not up to the task. While I was working on this task, Mackenzie heading down the street to grab some more clothes for Bailor at the BabyGap, an option we had wished we knew about earlier in the week.