Day Two

Well, today we experienced Beijing traffic!  I guess with 16 million people in the same city, everyone wants to get out of town for the weekend.  After another wonderful breakfast, we headed out to visit the Great Wall, and after several hours in bumper to bumper traffic, we made it!  (we did stop at a jade factory, but just like the silk factory, it was more of a sale's pitch than anything else.)  The Great Wall in incredible!  To think that they started this back around 200 or 400 B.C.!  Both Kimberly and I will be extremely sore tomorrow, but it was worth it.  We climbed up about 2 miles of stairs to get to the top of the mountain.  The views up there are majestic, not so much because of the wall, but because of God's incredible handiwork.  The mountains were all around us, and besides the smog, the scenery was breath-taking (or maybe that happened because I'm so out-of-shape!) ha!

 

We headed back to the hotel, but not before taking a rickshaw trip through Hutang, the old section of Beijing.  It was a bit chilly, but Kimberly felt like we were at the North Pole.  We chose to skip another "local" dinner with the group, and instead took a taxi back to the hotel.  We handed the driver the adress of the hotel, but he started talking to us in Chinese.  Thankfully our guide was still by the curb, and she helped us out.  Turns out the driver couldn't read the directions because he didn't have his glasses with him.  That was a great boost of confidence before he jumped into Beijing traffic!  :)  We made it to the hotel in one piece, then I convinced a frozen Kimberly to walk with me a few blocks to the market section of town.  Lots of neon and lights everywhere (kind of what you imagine when you think of a shopping street in China), including things to eat on a stick that shouldn't be on a stick:  scorpions, seahorses, and some rather large larvae or bugs of some sort.  Kimberly could not stand the smell, so we turned around and grabbed some dinner at KFC.  As we walked back to the hotel, 3 college age kids said hi to us in english, then struck up a conversation with us.  This was our first attempt at the local residents to practice their conversational english.  We told them we were there to adopt Sarah, and they were amazed that we would do so, even after already having 4 kids!  They kept telling me how young I looked (can you imagine?) and that Kimberly was such a pretty, young girl.  Like most of the folks we've met, they're amazed that I'm Kimberly's dad!!  Ha Ha Ha!   They invited us for a drink to talk more, but we decided we better head back to get cleaned up and packed, as we leave for Zengzhou at 8:00 am sharp tomorrow morning!  Just one more full day before we meet our Sarah!!!!  We can hardly wait!

 

Martin

This was the view outside our hotel room.  The houses in the background are part of the Forbidden City.

This was posted outside the bathroom at the Forbidden City - this hole in the ground got a 4 

star rating!