We Are Here!

We arrived in China late last night and finally made it to our hotel about 1:30am.   We got some sleep on the plane but not a lot and so we were completely exhausted.  We all agreed that the long flight wasn’t as bad as we were expecting, maybe since we had prepared ourselves for it to be miserable it ended up being OK.  Our first impressions of the Beijing airport was that it was huge and super smoggy, you could just see it in the air inside the building.  We met our guide there and he got us to the hotel and all checked in, told us to be ready for the Great Wall tour day at 8:30am and then we went to our rooms and crashed.

We slept until 7:00 and then went down for the big breakfast buffet which was awesome.  There was so much food I don’t even think that I saw it all.   We found our friends Pete and Addie, and our friend Judy, and met several other Holt couples.  There were nine Holt families on our bus and tour today so it was really fun just getting to know them and to know that we will all meet up again in a week after we have our new children. 

Our main event of the day was the tour of the Great Wall.  I don’t know what I thought the Great Wall was, but for the rest of my life I will remember the endless steep steps and trying to get to the top only to find that there was always more to climb.  I am a little scared about how sore I am going to be tomorrow,  it was like the worst stairmaster that you can imagine.  We lucked out and had beautiful weather with temps in the 60’s, we had been expecting to be freezing so were somewhat overdressed.  I feel like I did a major workout in jeans which did not feel the greatest.  It was an amazing sight though, and actually in some ways felt great to move so much after the 14 straight hours of sitting on the plane yesterday. 

After the Great Wall we all got back on the bus and headed to lunch at a restaurant in a building with a massive jade store, so we had another tour there.  Notice in the pictures below there is one with Michael Phelps on the wall, I guess during the Beijing Olympics they made medals with jade in them so they had these pictures on display.  Jade apparently is not only the standard green color that we all think of, but comes in many other colors as well.  We saw a ton of jewelry and some other interesting creations.

Our last event of the day was the Hutong Lane tour, where you get to see an old part of the city with narrow streets and a first hand look at how local people live.  As soon as we got off the bus in this area, we were hounded by Chinese people selling scarves, bags, watches, etc.   They were RELENTLESS.  For 10-15 minutes straight, my mom and I had a lady shoving scarves at us and giving us prices that kept getting lower and lower.  Mom gave in first and bought some (which really are beautiful and great prices too) and then finally after a long time of the woman riding her bike by us as we rode through the streets,  yelling “Lady, lady….just ten American dollars for all this!  Hey Lady!  Lady!”   I bought some too.  Even after this they hounded us trying to get us to buy more.  It was kind of hilarious. 

Overall this was a great first day in China.  We feel like we saw and experienced a lot considering that we have not even been here for 24 hours yet!  Tomorrow will be another day of touring so we are looking forward to that, but for now it is time to get some serious sleep.