Beijing

It has been a wonderful day in Beijing!  It started very early this morning...but that was no problem because we woke up around 4am & didn't sleep much after that!  (This would be 4pm in NC).  After breakfast at the hotel, we headed off for the Summer Palace, which was a whole complex of interesting buildings and courtyards.  After this we went to the Jade market where we looked at some beautiful jade jewelry (none of which we chose to afford!)  We had a traditional Chinese lunch which was quite good, pretty similar to Chinese food we've had in the US.  The Great Wall was the next stop on our adventure, and Monte and I climbed the "hard" route...(of course, how could Monte want to take the "easy" route??)  The reward for taking the hard route was great views of the wall and surrounding mountains...and a great workout! On the way to dinner, we stopped for a few minutes at the Olympic Green, which was very cool! The architecture really is spectacular!  Overall, we have found Beijing to be a lovely city....lots of landscaping everywhere you go, clean, much less chaotic than I expected with all the bikes. The weather has been awesome!  We hear this is the "golden" time to visit because of the blue skies and very pleasant temperatures.  We know that the cool temps won't last for us....Guangzhou is much hotter! 

There are 13 families here from our agency, and we met other families from other agencies on the plane trip as well.  It is a really nice group of people - we are all so excited & its been a blessing to share our adoption stories with one another.  We'll do more sightseeing tomorrow, then each family will go to their child's province.  There is one other family going with us to Guangdong province.

One more day and then we will meet Zane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!