Hello from Beijing!

Hello from China!!

For some reason, we are having difficulty figuring out the blogging thing from China. All of the characters are squares (not Chinese characters) ... not sure how well this will work, but we're trying!

We can describe our flight from Detroit to Tokyo in one word -- looooong!! Thirteen hours is a really long time to be on an airplane! We were so happy to finally land in Tokyo and have a couple of hours to walk around before our connecting flight to Beijing. We met MANY other couples from the US who are also adopting children from China. Many of them were from Wisconsin or Minnesota, traveling in a group. The flight from Tokyo to Beijing was only four hours, and there was a movie screen for each seat, so we were much happier on that flight – haha!

We arrived in Beijing at 10:30pm on Friday night. (China time is exactly 12 hours ahead of Michigan time, so it was 10:30am on Friday morning for all of you.) When we arrived, our guide and driver were waiting for us at the airport. They took us straight to the hotel, which was about a 25-minute drive. We were exhausted from too much flying and not much sleeping, but we slept somewhat fitfully – our stomachs were just not feeling well from the jet lag and airplane food, and I was so worried about oversleeping! We woke up at 7am to get ready, and we had breakfast in one of the hotel restaurants. Mostly American-like foods (scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage) and some Chinese cuisine that I can’t remember. We are careful not to eat too much or too exotic of foods, because we don’t want to get sick.

At 9am, we met our guide and driver in the hotel lobby and headed for the Great Wall!! What an amazing experience … hard to describe the awesome beauty and incredible workmanship! It was sunny outside, but VERY WINDY and pretty chilly, so we bought a hat and scarf for 50 RMB (about 7 US dollars) before climbing. Anyone who knows my lung capacity (and aversion for working out – ha!) will not be surprised that I had to stop MANY times on the way up to catch my breath and rest my pounding heart! If you see in the picture below, there is a small building right behind us and four ‘towers’ behind that. I made it to the first tower (don’t laugh – it was hard!!), and Jim made it all the way to the fourth one while I waited at the first one, wondering if they had rescue services at the Great Wall. On the walk back down, we asked an English-speaking passerby to take our picture, which is above.

We spent about an hour and a half at the Great Wall, and then headed to lunch a very short drive away. I’m not sure the names of the food we ate, but it was fairly traditional American-like Chinese food: beef with green peppers, pineapple chicken, white rice, etc. Then we bought a few gifts at the humongous gift shop and got back in the car to head to the Summer Palace. This is a lavish group of 800-year-old buildings and courtyards on a beautiful man-made lake where the emperor used to spend his summer months. (Tomorrow we travel to the Forbidden City, which was the primary residence of the emperor during the winter months.)

Back in the car and on to the Pearl Market – a large store selling pearls in all shapes, sizes and prices. (We didn’t buy anything there.) Then the guide and driver took us back to the hotel – I think it was around 4:30pm. We dropped off a few things in our hotel room and then went for a long walk down the street to an outdoor shopping area on a street where cars are not allowed – pedestrians only. Many clothing stores, jewelry stores, souvenir stores, and even a McDonalds and a KFC. We stopped to buy batteries for my alarm clock and headed back to the hotel.

We ate dinner at the same restaurant in the hotel where we had breakfast. We thought they were closed because NO ONE was eating there, but they were open and we didn’t want to walk any further, so we went in. The dinner fare was much less American than breakfast was!! They had shark fin soup, ox tongue (no kidding!!), piglet legs, and squid with mangos! There were a few other things, as well, and we opted for the safer choices (although I did try the squid and really liked it).

Now we’re back in our room, getting ready to prepare for tomorrow. We meet our guide and driver at 10:30am to see the Forbidden City, and then they’ll drop us off at the airport around 1:30pm. From there, it’s a short flight to Chongqing, the city where our little girl has lived her first three years of life. We meet Yufeng in 36 hours!!! I guess that means we have 36 hours to make a final decision on a name – yikes! I’d better go read through that baby name book one more time…!