Day 1 - Touring Beijing

Greetings from Beijing.  As Elise mentioned yesterday, we were fried when we finally hit our hotel pillows at 8:30 pm local time, which still felt like 4:30 am to us.  You would think that we would be able to sleep a long time after being up for 24 hours, but we still found ourselves awake around 3:30 am local time.  So we all got showered, dressed, and cruised around the hotel a bit, waiting for the breakfast to open up at 6 am.  While we were wandering we ran into another man in our travel group with his young son who was also having difficulty sleeping.  Turns out he is a worship pastor at a large reformed church in the Chicago area. Needless to say we hit it off with him and his family, and have enjoyed getting to know our fellow travel companions on this adoption road.  There are a total of 11 families traveling together for the next 2 weeks.  It has been a particular blessing to be traveling with our friends from home, the Barcelos family.

After breakfast we headed out for a day of touring.  Our first stop was a rickshaw ride to tour a traditional Beijing home, called a "Hutong".  Think four small, primitive rooms surrounding an outdoor courtyard with no private bathrooms,  only access to public bathrooms.  Did I mention it was snowing here in Beijing?  It snowed for at least 4 hours, which made for an interesting rickshaw ride.  What was shocking to us about the Hutong we visited was that it was valued at over $7 million because of it's location and historical significance.  Crazy

                                                   Doug & Aaron on the rickshaw

After a traditional Chinese lunch, we headed to a silk factory, where we got to see the process of silk garment and quilt making, which Beijing is famous for

Next was Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.  You are probably familiar with the square, but may not have heard of the Forbidden City, I know I hadn't.  The Forbidden City was built about 600 years ago and was built as a palace for the emperor and 30,000 of his closest friends.  This palace, or city, is 9,999 rooms, covers hundreds of acres and was reserved for government officials only, thus "forbidden" to any Chinese commoners.

                                              Tiananmen Square with the Barcelos Family

                                                           Forbidden City

Once done with our tours for the day, we ventured out to dinner in Beijing with our friends the Barcelos's.  We were in search of the famous "Peking Duck".  For the first time during our time here we were without our guide and the language barrier became evident.  At one point we thought we ordered rice and water, which never came, and Kendra Barcelos even resorted to sign language in a last ditch effort at communication.  Elise's contribution to the ordering process was "I want fried bean curd".  What?  Who orders that?  So we got a pyramid of fried bean curd (or bean "turd" as Aaron called it) that nobody would eat, so Mr. Iron Gut (me) powered through four bean curd logs.  As I type this, I can still feel them rolling around inside.  Lets hope Elise can do better next time.

                                                             Fried Bean Curd

                                                           Beijing at Christmas

Signing off for now. Tomorrow we are off to the Great Wall, a jade factory, and an acrobat show.  Only 2 1/2 more days until our "gotcha day" with little Jack!

Doug (for Elise too)