Day 3: The Great Wall

This was our third day in China and after breakfast, we came down to meet our group in the lobby of the hotel room.  Since we have the most kids, we were afraid we would be the last ones to arrive and hold up the whole group.  Instead, we were the first ones!

Gettting up early was not a challenge as we are still a little (or a lot) jet lagged.

After waiting for about 5 minutes, the rest of the group trickled in.  There are 8 families in our cohort, all adopting one or more kids on this trip.  They are from various parts of the U.S. and there is another family from Portland, OR.

During the 1 hour bus ride to the Great Wall, George, our guide who is an employee of our adoption agency, told up about the history of the Wall.  If the discontiguous pieces are all put together, the Wall is about 5,000 miles long and took hundreds of years to build.

When we got up there, the girls spotted a lion and rubbed its paws, of course.

And so we started the climb. Erica and Eliana went up ahead.  Karina was slower, because some of the steps were as high as her thigh.  But she wanted to keep going until she reached a high guard tower.  She also got stopped a lot by Chinese tourist who wanted to take her picture, or preferably, wanted to take a picture with her!

Almost there!  Elvin brought up the rear carrying Gabey.  He wanted to follow Mommy and not wait at the foot of the Great Wall.

We finally reached the Great Wall after about a 45 minute climb.  It gave us a new perspective on how steep it was!

The descent was just as hard, but for different reasons.  It was a big workout for your thigh muscles going down those big steps!

Here is a family pose...we climbed all the way up to that tower on top of the hill behind us.

After getting back on the bus, we visited a jade factory.  They had some impressive carvings, such as the one below where the man is carving a sphere which rolls around loosely embedded within a larger sphere within yet another sphere made out of jade.

 This ginormous boat made out of jade had a price tag of over $1,000,000.

 On the bus, we also passed by the Olympic Park, with the Birds Nest and the Water Cube venues.

 And the last thing for the afternoon was to watch a Chinese acrobatic show.

Amongst other things, we saw these ladies pile themselves onto this bicycle running circles on the stage.  It was pretty impressive and we wondered how much weight was on the shoulders of the lady pedaling the bike.

When we got back to the hotel we ate dinner at our "regular" restaurant and headed back to the hotel to pack our bags.  Tomorrow we bid farewell to George, leave Beijing, and head off to Zhengzhou via bullet train; this is the city where Xiao Yu lives.

Overall, our trip has gone well.  We are starting to adjust to the time change.  Also the kids have done very well with the new food and different environment.  At home, Karina eats EVERYTHING with ranch dressing.  And although we bought and brought single serve packets of Kraft Ranch dressing with us, she has not asked for it once and is happy to eat the rice and noodles here sans Ranch.  Everyone is mostly staying healthy.  Gabriel has been a little bit under the weather recently, so we appreciate your prayers with that.  We're looking forward to the next leg of the trip; the sight seeing is done and we're moving on to the real reason for why we are here...