Wednesday, July 4, 2012

 To see the previous posts of their trip, go to “Older Post” found at the bottom of the page.

07-05-12_Great-Wall

Today we went to the Great Wall of China.  It was a tad bit cooler and not as clear as it has been but still an amazing site to see!

 

 
 
I made it to about the halfway mark to the first tower and petered out.  Syd was literally running up the crazy stairs, so she continued on to half way between the first and second tower with another family.  Guess all that hockey practice has given her really strong legs :-)

 
 
Apparently they still use donkeys to carry the rubble off the mountain!

After the Great Wall we went to lunch at a restaurant called The Great Wall Restaurant--go figure.

Kelly, these little shrimps with their googly eyes are for you :-)


 Then we went to the Great Hall of the People where they had a wonderful ceremony for all 182 adopted Chinese kids in our group!  It was ridiculously hot and we had to stand on bleachers for about an hour.  Two kids barfed and one little guy ran out doing the potty dance but other than that, it was really nice and heart felt. 

The head government official of Chinese Children's Welfare spoke (through an interpreter) and said wonderful things about our kids and their parents.  There was a lot of media there filming the entire ceremony so we may be in the paper tomorrow!  Hopefully our hotel gets lots of extras :-)  It was neat to go into the Great Hall, it was like going into the White House I suppose.  Lots of marble, brass and red carpets everywhere.  We were not allowed to take cameras in but we are supposed to get a picture of the entire group.  It was quite a privilege to have the Minister speak to us!  All of the kids got a special panda from the officials and guess who's cuddled up right now with hers? 

We leave Beijing tomorrow on at 10:00 flight for Xi'an.  When we land, we'll go straight to the Tera Cotta Warriors which I cannot wait to see!  Then some kind of show and dumpling dinner.  Not sure if I'll be able to post tomorrow, I may be too tired and I'm not sure what internet connection is like. 

 



No comments:

Post a Comment