Friday, January 15, 2010

Ni hao (hello) from Beijing,

We can hardly believe that we are in Tia’s homeland. It is very interesting how different yet similar things are here. We are traveling with a group of 29 families. It has been fun to meet them and hear their adoption stories. Other than the families in our group, we have not seen any Americans.

Our day started around 2:30AM when Kassidy woke up. We all tried to go back to sleep but we gave in got up at 4AM. We talked on Skype and hung out until breakfast. We were the first family at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Many very nice young ladies and gentleman work at the buffet but none of them speak English. We had some difficultly explaining that we preferred bottled water. Our guide gave us instructions not to drink any local water or use ice in any drinks. The presentation of the food selections of the buffet was just beautiful but we did not recognize many of the options. Some of the choices that we did recognize were bread, bacon, baked beans (yes, for breakfast) watermelon, oranges, cucumbers, pot stickers, Chinese noodles, fried rice, rice krispies cereal. A little while later they opened an egg station. Shawn had an egg and cheese omelet. Kassidy and I really enjoyed the Chinese fried rice.

We had an informational meeting this morning with Shiyan. Shiyan has been working with our agency for many years and lives in China. She is wonderful and a wealth of knowledge. Shiyan then took us to a local grocery store to buy bottled water and snacks. The store was 2 floors with an escalator. That was a fun experience, many different sights and smells.

We will be going to see an acrobat show this evening. We were advised to take a nap today in the afternoon because many times the families are so tired from jet lag that they fall asleep during the show. The weather today was nice. Sunny and approx. 30 degrees. Beijing has been having unusually cold weather. Today was mild.