We Are in China!

I tried to post this once with no success, so I'm trying again with only one picture.  Please comment and let me know if it works.  Any of you who have used blogger via email from China...any tips about posting pictures would be appreciated.  Thanks!

Well, it's early Saturday morning in China and I can't sleep anymore.  I meant to blog last night, but I was honestly so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open.  I can definitely see why they have you come a few days before you get your baby so that you can try to get over the jet lag.  It has also been a good experience to learn more about China's culture and customs since this is our daughter's heritage.  So here's a long, rambly rundown of our trip so far...

On Tuesday night we left Logan and stayed at my parent's house.  We could only take two 44 lb. bags with us, so we spent lots of time shuffling and getting rid of stuff to make the weight work.  We finally got there about midnight, talked to my parents a while and then attempted to sleep a few hours before we left at 4 a.m. for the airport.  My parents dropped us off about 5 a.m.  We were tired and I was sad about leaving the kids, but we were ready to go.  Let's just say things didn't go smoothly getting checked in.  There was a huge line, and the kiosk wouldn't let us check in because an agent needed to verify our passports.  We stood in line forever.  There were two clerks on duty, one of which was new and needed help most of the time.  There was a family in front of us who spent about 25 minutes at the counter shuffling items back and forth between garbage bags and luggage and stuff to avoid paying overweight charges.  My blood pressure was rising.  When we finally got up there they had trouble with the fact that Leah was only a return passenger even though I had checked that numerous times with the agents.  The agent typed for like 15 minutes...it was like that scene in Meet the Parents, except it wasn't funny when it was happening to us.  We finally got checked in at 6:15 and got through security and to the gate about 15 minutes before our flight left.  Another lady near us who they were also having trouble checking in showed up, and they had hand written her a ticket.  Seriously?  It was not a good first impression of American Airlines!

We then spent 8 hours in the Chicago Airport.  Yes, 8...I think that speaks for itself.  In that meantime we invested in some of those sweet pillows that wrap around your neck for our 13 hour flight to Beijing.  We left Chicago at about 8 pm.  We both slept on and off during the flight but not great.  It was a really long time to sit and when we got there it was 11 pm the next night in China.  The Beijing airport was amazing.  It's the biggest thing I've ever seen!  It's a huge glass structure.  After we finally got our bags and got through customs our guide Candy was there to pick us up.  She works for our agency and has been our local tour guide.  We headed to the hotel in a van with another family.  We finally rolled in here about 12:30 a.m. after about 30 1/2 straight hours of traveling.  

Friday morning we got up and tried to skype the kids.  The laptop died and the plug in we had didn't work, so I was pretty sad but we got an adapter from the front desk and were back in business.  It was so great to talk to them.  I sure miss those boys already.  Our hotel is very nice--not just nice for China but nice in general.  I had high hopes for the continental breakfast but lets just say that eggs were the only recognizable thing on the menu.  I left hungry!  We left at 9 a.m. with our group on a bus to tour Beijing.  We rode a rickshaw through the hutong which is a very old part of the city made up of all these little lanes and alleys where people live.  We even went into the house of a local resident, Mrs. Wu, where she told us about her life in that same one room home with a shared restroom/water facilities for the last 50+ years.  It was very interesting.  She served us some saffron flower tea which had the most bitter, awful taste ever.  I thought it was pretty interesting that she was a Catholic and had religious pictures all over her house.  We also visited a silk factory and learned about the whole process of making silk fabrics from the silk worms.  It was very cool!  There were lots of beautiful things to buy, but we refrained.  We then ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant.  They brought out lots of dishes for us to try.  A few were pretty good, but I again left hungry.  After lunch we headed on the bus again to Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City.  Our guide Candy was great, and I learned a lot today.  She has taught us some new Chinese words and a lot about the history of the city.  It is the National Congress right now, so we couldn't actually go into the square.  The Forbidden City was incredible.  I can't even describe how huge it was.  It was built 500 years ago and was home to a series of emperors until the early 1900s.  Truly incredible.  After we got back to the hotel around 4:00 I was bonking so bad.  We both fell asleep for a while and then decided we had to eat something.  We ventured out about 7:00 to find something.  I couldn't bare the thought of more Chinese food, especially some that might make us sick, so we searched high and low for McDonalds.  Yes, while we're here McDonalds is a good thing.  We put in about 3 miles of walking round trip and did succeed in finding one!  We got in there and of course the menu was in Chinese.  Luckily, they whipped out a picture menu in English for us, and we pointed to what we wanted.  We finally made it back home and that's when I crashed and slept like the dead for a while.  Now we're ready to hit the city for one more day before we fly to Zhengzhou tomorrow.  Beijing has been very interesting but just like when I've visited big cities in America it has reminded me that I'm not cut out for city living.  Add the really bad air pollution and the fact that people are smoking everywhere, and I'm ready to move on to the next phase of the trip.  

.