Going to the Dentist in Huainan

Earlier I mentioned that Adam's crown popped off (during the week of bad luck) but Dreamer's uncle is a dentist so we made an appointment with him. The first appointment happened on January 2nd, then they had to send the mold of Adam's mouth to Shanghai to have the crown made, then the crown got put on last Friday. So here is how it went.

Difference #1: The dentist office isn't a stand alone building, it's inside of a hospital. Here's a picture of the hospital:

Here's a picture of a hilarious sign out front, showing you where some departments are:

Obviously my favorite is the Hemorrhoid Department but the Facial Features Department comes in a close second. "Within Department" is probably just a bad translation of Internal Medicine. Here's a picture of the hallway the dentist office was in:

I don't know if you can see the doors with bars on them but it did have a very prisony feel to it. But apparently they were going to be renovating soon.

Well when you walk into the office, there's the front desk, and then there's a dentist chair right next to it.

Difference #2: No privacy. Adam did get to go into a different room (not the dentist chair next to the front desk) but Mr. Yu left the door open so random people could (and did) pop their heads in and oogle for a minute. Dreamer and I actually got to sit in there with him the whole time, which is good because there was some translating to do. Dreamer's English is good, but she's not up to snuff on her dental vocab so she would translate to me and I would clarify to Adam what to do with this mouth. Difference # 3: No receptionist. Mr. Yu kept answering his phone whenever it rang, which was often. And that's not considered rude here. People always answer their phones and generally they don't have voicemail. So if someone calls you and you don't answer, they will usually call back 2 or 3 times before giving up. Anyways, it just kinda slowed things down a bit. Difference # 4: Not as hygenic. He didn't wear gloves, his dentist tools (though I'm sure they were clean) were not pulled out of packaging in front of us like they do in the US, and his tray looked like this:

And the room itself was not the sterile environment we're used to. My favorite part of the room was the piece of random fabric that was nailed to the wall acting as a curtain over the window. I didn't take a picture of it but you can see a small bit of it in the right side of this picture:

Anyways, despite the differences, the actual procedure and the quality of the crown were the same and it cost a lot less. It was only $350, and that's without insurance. Crowns are $500 with insurance in the US. So we were happy with the experience.

Here are a couple more dishes from the housekeeper:

Sausage. Too salty and fatty

Egg thing. Delicious!

And here's Smudgie peeking out from under the living room curtain. His favorite thing is to sit behind the curtain and watch people go by. Then you can say "Where did Smudgie go?" and he'll pop his head out like this: