Day Two- Part Two- Beijing

The part of our short stay in Beijing that I was most excited about was going to the Great Wall. To me, it symbolizes China. It almost seemed like a trip to China without seeing the Wall would be a loss. We didn’t originally plan to go to Beijing before getting Khloe. In fact, it wasn’t until after we had our Travel Approval and we were purchasing our plane tickets (less than 2 weeks before we were leaving) that we realized we were going to be able to! It was such an amazing blessing! We really wanted to be able to do some sightseeing in Beijing first, but we knew we’d have to leave a day earlier and that it would cost us more money. We didn’t even have all of the travel funds we needed yet as it was, so there was no way we were going to be able to afford it. I was really sad at first, but as the months passed by, I came to terms with it and realized that we’d be back one day and I could see everything I wanted to.

As we were pricing our plane tickets with our travel agent, we were stunned to realize that by leaving on a Friday instead of a Thursday, the tickets were going to go up about $500 EACH! So, we decided that to save the money, we would go ahead and leave a day early. Then we thought since we were leaving a day early anyway, we’d ask her to price the tickets to Beijing just to see what the price difference would be. To our amazement, the tickets into Beijing were ANOTHER $500 EACH cheaper! WHAT?!?!?! We saved $1,000 per ticket to be able to go to Beijing a day early. God is so good. We used some of the saved money that we’d set aside for the plane tickets to pay for our extra time in Beijing (which didn’t cost much!).

I still get goose bumps when I tell this story of how God blessed us with something that was totally unnecessary but still incredibly special to us. We give him all the glory!

After we saw the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, we got back in the van and headed to the Great Wall. The drive out of town was beautiful. I loved getting to see the mountains. I’ve never even been out west in the US, so I’ve never seen mountains like that.  I was in awe!

Here’s a couple pictures of the mountains as we drove

Here’s a description of the section of the wall we went to

Entrance

So beautiful

I’m at the Great Wall of China!!!

Group photo

Let me just start by saying that we had the most fun here. Probably more fun than should’ve been allowed :) Previously, our in our short time in the city, I thought the local people seemed mostly unhappy. When we got to the Great Wall, though, everyone was so happy! Taking pictures, visiting, smiling huge, beautiful smiles. I absolutely loved it here!

I can’t tell you how many photos the guys photo bombed. I was sure we were going to get thrown out :) But you know what, everyone loved it! People were even asking to take pictures with us :) There were very few westerners there that day and I think they were a bit fascinated by the fair skin, blonde (or in my case super curly) hair. It was just really fun.

Scott and Jason jumped behind these sweet ladies as they were having their picture taken by a friend. As soon as they saw the boys standing behind them, they started laughing and grabbing the boys to get pictures with them. They each took turns taking the picture, so they could each have a picture with them with the handsome American boys :)

Rachel and I loved these ladies. They were too cool to wear their blue tour group hats normally :)

Absolutely precious.

This was awesome. We are posing cute for Jason to take our picture and literally as he pushes the button on the camera, this lady’s flag whacks me right in the face. Here’s me being all awkward and making hilarious faces—standing next to my gorgeous Barbie doll look a like friend :) Typical, goofy Erica :) We laughed so hard I didn’t know if I could compose myself for another picture :) Everyone around us was even laughing!

Ok, let’s try that again! Cute!

Going up!

It was a brisk day in the City,  but it was downright COLD at the Wall! There’s leftover ice and snow to prove it!

I stopped after the 3rd tower. The other 3 climbed all the way they could. It was only open to the 5th or 6th tower.

Here’s Jason being silly at the top :)

He almost met his demise while he took pictures ;)

But he got some really cool ones!

My legs were already hurting (and I didn’t even climb to the top!) so at one point, I turned around and walked backwards :) Here I am waving to J.

As we were standing towards the beginning of this section waiting for our guide, these precious gentlemen came and asked if they could  have a picture with us. Made our day. They were totally getting fresh with us. Jason tried to offer a kiss on the cheek from me to the man on the end. The man was totally all for it and I just giggled and shook my head. Then I shot “the look” to my husband :) But we made the old men giggle and we thought it was fun too!

There were some beautiful temples on the grounds

Inside one of the temples

Here we are with our wonderful guide Rocky. We all LOVED him!!

 

What an incredible day!!! I will never forget getting to climb the Great Wall of China and all the happy, beautiful people we met that day!

Day Two- Part One

We got to our hotel on Friday evening around 5pm or so. We knew that despite the fact that we’d only had about 5 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours and all we wanted to do was collapse into bed, we knew that it was in our best interest to stay up until at least 7 or 8 that way we wouldn’t wake up quite so early the next morning. This was advice given to us to combat the jet lag so we took the advice. We settled into our room, sent a few “we made it” emails and realized pretty quickly that we’d never stay awake if we stayed in the room. So we decided to venture down to one of the hotel’s restaurants for dinner. It was our first real cultural experience.

We were the only Caucasian people in the whole hotel, much less this restaurant, as far as we could see. No one spoke a single bit of English. here we go- we knew we’d encounter this, so we just dove right in. :) They immediately walked us to a table and gave  us picture menus. We pointed to what looked good and hoped for the best. We each ordered a coke and they brought it to us in cans with a wine glass to pour the coke into. And of course, it was hot, and they offered no ice. This was another cultural thing that we’d heard of that I was dreading. When we go out, I order EXTRA ice in my drinks! Hot coke isn’t so good to me… but we were in desperate need of some extra caffeine if we were going to stay up for at least a couple more hours.

The meal came and the food was surprisingly delicious. We ended up having a lamb dish,a spicy shrimp and vegetable dish, fried rice (which was maybe the most delicious I’ve ever had), and some meat dumplings which were fabulous. All of it was good. The 4 of us ate and ate until we couldn’t eat anymore and we still had food left!

When it came time to pay, it got a little more interesting. No one spoke English and we obviously don’t speak a lick of Chinese! We started asking who/how to pay and we got major deer in the headlights looks. Several different employees came to try to figure out what we were talking about and it didn’t help much. Finally we began doing our best charades and using motions and hand gestures and the guys whipped out the money. Now we were getting somewhere! We had been told that it wasn’t customary and therefore unnecessary to tip at restaurants in China. Both of us couples pride ourselves in being really good tippers when we eat out, so this was really hard for us and we wondered if it really was ok.

Finally, the guys decided to leave the change on the table. When we left, they noticed it and tried to chase us out with the money! We told them no, that we didn’t want it, that it was for them. You should’ve seen the confusion on their faces. They just looked down at the money, then back at us, then back at the money. We just kept walking out and left them to figure it out :) We felt comfortable about tipping and frankly we were too tired to care much. Plus the amount of CNY didn’t amount to much in US dollars. (A few days later, we all realized that in our tiredness, and the fact that we didn’t have a clear understanding of the exchange rate yet, we really did over tip. Let’s just say it would’ve been considered a really nice tip in the US where tipping is expected :) Oh well! We all decided that we really just wanted to bless them and we hoped that the sweet servers had been able to keep the money like we’d intended.)

We headed back to our rooms, I blogged a little while Jason showered. He took an Ambien and he was out before his head even hit the pillow. I decided to take my Ambien before I took my shower to give it time to kick in. I’ve never taken it before and let’s just say that I didn’t need much time for it to kick in! I felt like I couldn’t hold my head up before I even got out of the shower. I was stumbling around and half crawling around the room trying to get in the bed!

We, obviously, went right to sleep and we slept pretty good. We each woke up several times, but thanks to the meds, we were able to go right back to sleep each time. We were wide awake at 4am though- which we expected. So, we decided to just get up and start our big day. We skyped with my Mom and Dad and Rhett and Gracie and sent an email to Braden (he was unavailable to skype that day).

We got ready and headed down to the hotel’s breakfast buffet early so we could enjoy and not be in a rush. We woke up STARVING! The breakfast buffet was just as wonderful as we’d heard. So much fresh food and fresh juices to chose from. We definitely filled our bellies!

We met our AMAZING guide, Rocky, in the lobby at 7am to start our BIG, LONG, WONDERFUL day.

Here’s the outside of our hotel.

We began our day with a walk from our hotel to Tiananmen Square. It was about a 30 minute walk.

Here’s Scott, Rocky and Jason leading the way. Rachel and I were bringing up the rear taking 900,000 pictures of every little thing :)

Some sights along the way. We walked over that bridge.

Walking on the bridge.

I was in awe of all of the signs in Chinese. What a beautiful written language!

Street view

We walked past this wall, which was one of the original city walls. It is several hundred years old. The age and history that is present all around you in China is amazing. Considering we live in a country that is so young and only has a couple hundred years of history!

View of Tiananmen Square as we approached it

In Tiananmen Square looking towards the Forbidden City

All 4 of us. Behind us is the building is Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall. It’s the mausoleum/final resting place where his body is on display in a glass case. 

I love this picture of us. Look at all those hundreds and hundreds of  people behind us in front of the Memorial Hall. Those are all people in line to view Chairman Mao’s body.

I was in awe of the uniformed soldiers everywhere. Not something you typically see in the US.

Forbidden City

Standing hear the Forbidden City, looking back towards Tiananmen Square. You can see Scott and Jason in the background- like playing Where’s Waldo :)

We were having so much fun, soaking in all of our amazing touristy experiences!

Walking back to the hotel

 

After we got back to the hotel, our driver was there with the van waiting on us. After a quick stop up to our rooms to repack our backpacks for the day, grab some snacks, etc. we hopped in the van and headed out.

First stop: The Olympic Bird’s Nest and Water Cube

We drove quite a while (Beijing is a HUGE city!!!) and then we saw it! It was so cool to get to see, in person, iconic places that you’ve seen only on tv. We jumped out and took a bunch of pictures.

This was a really neat shaped building across the street from the Olympic Venues. This was a huge hotel that had housed media, athletes, etc. during the 2008 games.

Next, we headed to a Jade Market.

This Lion was outside the front door. Later we realized that they are in front of almost all buildings! There’s always a set of 2- a male on one side and a female on the other.

This man was carving a jade family ball (which was on our list of things we wanted to purchase on our trip) so we watched for a few minutes. Very cool!

He showed us what he was working on. They start with a solid piece of jade and carve it into a ball. Then they carve the designs and then carve the interior of the ball as well and it ends up being several balls inside of each other- representing generations of families. Amazing and beautiful.

This was a huge and gorgeous, detailed carving made out of jade.

Here is the retail area. This was a HUGE room full of jewelry and other jade items for sale.

 

Here’s some pictures of the medals used in the 2008 Olympic games. They used jade in the medals. They were beautiful.

Here was our guide at the Jade factory.

We only bought the jade family ball here. Everything was so beautiful, but the prices were too high for us :)

This was only the beginning of our day. There was SO much more to come. You’ll have a hard time believing how much we crammed into one day! Our guide told us that most people do what we did in 1 1/2 days in 3 days! But we only had a short time there and we wanted to make the very most of every minute we had in Beijing. We can honestly say that we did. We had no down time and stayed moving!

More to come on our time in Beijing!

The first leg of our trip

I was too focused on bonding with Khloe (and also too busy and too tired!) to blog while we were in China, so I'm going to go back and tell the story of our trip in sections.

Part One: Getting There!

We left our house at 5:30am on Thursday, March 21. We stopped to pick up our dear friends Scott and Rachel on the way. Yes, we all got to travel together!!! Isn't God just SO good?!?! This was a miracle and an answer to prayer.
We had barely slept a wink the night before and I was worried that we were starting off the trip already so tired, but we were just so excited!

All of these pics were taken with my phone. There will be better quality pics on future posts :)

Getting ready to check in at the counter!!


We flew from home to Detroit. When we got to Detroit, we had a few hour layover, so we had a nice meal at the airport Chili's before shopping for drinks and snacks for the long plane ride, then we waited to board our plane.

Here we are-- waiting to board in Detroit! Looking tired but happy :)



Excited Mammas ready to hold their babies!!


I have never flown further than Mexico, so I was thrilled to see such a large, roomy plane :) And we each had tv screens in the seats in front of us! Let me tell you, these saved the LONG day :)


We all tried to make ourselves stay awake for the most part because we would be landing in Beijing at 3pm on Friday afternoon and we wanted to acclimate ourselves to
china time ASAP. When I started to get sleepy, I played a little Mahjong to keep myself awake.


Took this photo from the area behind our section during the flight. It was neat to see everyone's tv screens going at the same time.


We loved checking our progress on the flight tracker! Almost there!


Time to Destination: 1:10!!!!!!


Trying to take a picture of the mountains as we were approaching to land. There was too much smog... It was majestic! Beautiful!


Scott and Jason waiting on our luggage at the airport in Beijing. Rachel and I in the background fervently praying that all of our luggage showed up :)
And Praise God, every bag was there!!!


Just as we stepped outside the Beijing airport.


It was an overwhelming feeling that I can't really describe. Finally being there- in China. The country of my daughter's birth. The place I longed to be, but in my weakness feared I would never get the opportunity to experience. I feared that I was too
unworthy to be able to experience the blessing of finalizing the adoption of our daughter. You know, I am. But God, in His goodness and mercy blessed us anyway! I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am.
We were finally in China! Tired doesn't even begin to describe it, but my body just went into survival mode and I was fine! Ready to see the sights and counting down the hours till I would be holding my daughter!!!