Our First Day of Touring

Well we met all of the other families that we are traveling with today. We got to know most of them and hope to get to know the rest tomorrow, but all of them are really nice and all just as excited and tired as we are. We were outside most of the day and it was very cold, but not absolutely unbearable.

We started out meeting our guide Sherry. She is a wonderful young lady from Shanghai, who lives here in Beijing. She works for our adoption agency as a guide for adoptive families, so she does this a lot. The game we played all day, I called "Follow the Blue Flag". This was very important, because every where we went there were thousands of tour groups, each with a tour guide holding up a colored flag with a different logo on it, very helpful.

Sherry was full of great information that I won't try to pass along, because I'm sure I'll mess 99% of it up. I'll just give a quick run down and let you look at the pictures.

Most of the places we went were at least 600 years old, and incredibly accessible. You could walk most anywhere and touch most everything. Tiananmen Square is the most recent and was set up as the political center. The Forbidden City and Summer Palace were started centuries ago and were amazing. In the Forbidden City there are 10,000 buildings. All of this was for the Emperor and their family and subjects.

The Summer Palace is a 1,500+ acre "palace" full of buildings, gardens, a lake, temples and more. We really saw very little of both the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace in the 3 1/2 hours we spent at both places. It would take weeks to really take it all in. It was beautiful.

We also went to a pearl store. We didn't buy anything, but everything was nice. We went to a silk factory, which was quite impressive to see how they take silk cocoons and turn them into fabric. We did buy Audrey a formal outfit and a set of pajamas.

We ate at Chinese restaurants for lunch and supper. The lunch was more traditional, chopsticks and all, the supper was a buffet. Alex and I were pretty adventurous and Julie was a little more cautious. Alex learned that he like tofu. So far, I'm not that crazy about the food. The lunch was good, but the things I liked there weren't much of, and the supper reminded me of the Chinese buffets we have at home. I'm looking forward to our duck dinner tomorrow.

I have to say, I'm really proud of Alex. At 16 I don't know if I would have handled a day long historical tour as well. He never complained and actually seemed pretty interested in many things we saw.

Tomorrow we are going to an international church service, followed by lunch and a trip to the jade shop. After this we head to the Great Wall. We finish the night with an acrobatics show.