Saturday, January 16, 2010

Today was an amazing day! We toured a Cloisonne Factory. Cloisonne is beautiful handcrafted vases, plates, jewelry, figurines, etc. It is a multi-step and time consuming process for the artists that create these pieces. Many of the pieces take at least 30 days to complete. They are just beautiful in an array of colors and designs. We purchased a panda plate and are having it shipped home.

Our group then headed over to the great wall. Shawn was so excited as this has been a dream of his for many years! As we drove outside of the city we began to see the mountains and many ancient style buildings. We drove up to the area of the wall where they operate a cable car. It has been very cold outside so our group decided to ride the cable car instead of climbing the entire wall. I’m really glad we had this option. The three of us climbed into our cable car and were lifted up the side of the mountain. After exiting the cable car we still had to climb a section to reach the top. What an indescribable view!! It is just breathtaking. The wall is 6033 kilometers in distance. It is something to think about how much manpower was utilized to build it. I think this is a memory that will stick with us for years.

After the wall we stopped at a Chinese Restaurant for lunch. We had a big lazy susan in the middle of the table. Our guide, Joy ordered for us (thankfully). We don’t know what some of the things we ate were but everything was very tasty. Shawn and Kassidy enjoyed the food as well and we were all practicing eating with chop sticks.

The Chinese Restaurant was in the same building as a large Jade Factory. They had some really impressive things, large jade sculptures, jade jewelry and jade and stone vases. I found a beautiful urn type vase that I loved but 19,200 yuan was a bit over our budget. It was a very fun just looking at all of the items for sale.

We then took a drive past the Olympic Village. We saw the Bird’s Nest, Water Cube and many other buildings that hosted the events. We saw rows and rows of apartment buildings that were built to house the athletes. Joy told us that most of the buildings are still being used for sporting events and the apartments were sold to private investors to rent out.

I think I covered everything about our day. Thank you so much for the messages in our guestbook. It is really nice to hear from family and friends at home. We will be forever changed by viewing the moon from this side of the world.

We now have less than 48 hours until we meet Tia!