Saturday - Great Wall tour!

Today we went to the Great Wall, for lunch and then on a rickshaw tour of the Hutongs in Beijing. It was a really great day. The girls were just awesome and total troopers, especially given that we were all up around 4am! Lauren slept on the way to the Wall and after the rickshaw ride but Leah stayed awake all day – amazing! We went to the Badaling section of the Great Wall and it was neat to see. Our last trip for Lauren’s adoption, we went to a very remote section of the wall and did not see one other person on the wall. This was definitely different as it was very full of people and tons of “sales” people, even on the Wall. I had expected to see them all around but I assumed that once we paid the admission and went up there wouldn’t be people on the Great Wall selling stuff. That was a wrong assumption! We had an absolutely beautiful, blue sky day for the Wall and that was great to be able to see it go and go and go. But, boy was it ever COLD and windy!! I mean frigid cold! One of the Holt staff that was with us said it perfectly, “on the Wall, it is a lazy wind – it goes right through you instead of around you!” He was right. The girls, my parents and I didn’t stay up there long. We walked up, snapped a few pictures and then headed back down to the warm hotel that is there for some hot chocolate. John ventured way up the other side and was rewarded with beautiful views! After that we went to lunch at a Cloisone factory and it was a really good lunch. Leah, my picky eater, was eating everything in site and with her chopsticks! She just looked so grown up to us.

After shopping, we went on the Hutong Tour and that was really cool. We took bikes through the Hutongs which are the old style community where all the houses are built very close together with very narrow alleyways connecting them. The alleyways are so narrow that a car won’t fit down most of them just bicycles. We stopped in to meet one of the lady’s that lives in one of the hutongs so that we could see inside one. Her house was really cool. She said she was very fortunate to have 4 rooms and a kitchen. The place was actually quite big but our guide told us it wasn’t typical of all the hutong homes. Most just live in one room. John asked the lady what she was going to fix for dinner and she told us dumplings – John’s favorite! She disappeared for a moment and then came back with a plate full of dumplings for everyone to try. They were DELICIOUS! It was hard to convince John to continue on the rest of the tour because I’m certain he would have been happy to stay at her house and have dumplings for dinner!

After that we came back to the hotel and went to Sizzler for dinner! By 8:30 we were all wiped out and in bed. We are going to the orientation today and should see Kate's updated photos! And then tomorrow we will be going to Guangzhou for sweet Kate! By the way, for those of you who might not be familiar - you can click on the picture in the blog and it will enlarge it. I'm going to try to upload more pictures to our other spot. You can click here to see if I was successful! :) Thanks for all the comments. We all love reading them!