Beijing

**Until this notice is gone, I will be updating and adding to this post...just an fyi

Here we all are in the middle of the Forbidden City. After this picture was taken, we had 3-4 people come up and ask to have their picture taken with us...they loved Maglet's hair! While Jeff was buying our tickets to get inside, a lady came over, asked if she could have a picture taken with Maglet and then proceeded to pick her up and hug her tightly. Poor Maglet didn't feel very comfortable with that and decided to put her hat back on.

Here are some delicacies served up at the Night Market in Beijing.

Jeff and I at the old Night Market (they instituted a "cleaned up" version for the Olympic Games...pictured below with just Delise).
"Cleaned up" Night Market in Beijing. This is where all the pictures from the collage above were taken but the same things were served in the older section too.


Below is Delise's cousin Kevin eating some scorpion! He ate a total of 3 and on the last one, the stinger got stuck in his throat...he felt a little "off" for the rest of the night.

The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace was a temporary home for the Royal Family during the Qing Dynasty. It was more of a place for the Empress. It houses the Long Walk which is pictured in the collage on the left side. The tops of the ceiling are lined with these beautiful paintings I put one above and below the photo of the Long Walk as examples. The long walk is 728 meters long and is comprised of 14,000 of these paintings. It was unimaginably beautiful. Also of note the symbol for the Emperor was the dragon while the symbol for the Empress was the phoenix.

The Mutianyu Great Wall

This was another of my favorite parts of the trip (ok so I had a lot of them) I could have walked around on the wall for hours more but the kiddos were done. The Great Wall is situated on the top of a mountain range. It is also not one continuous wall, there are many sections of it and it breaks off into Y shapes (I didn't know this prior to being there). Also the air quality was very poor when we first got there and started to burn off closer to when we left (foggy?) as you'll notice in the photos.

We drove up as far as we could up the mountain and then we took a chair lift up to the actual wall. In the collage you will see a picture of Jeff and Kat on the lift. At the top we walked all over a section of the wall that had been rebuilt. It was amazing. When we were done, we then followed the "slidway" signs and took a metal Alpine-type slide back down to the village near the parking lot. I have to say that it went a lot faster than any Alpine slide I've ever been on and it was SO FUN!!! Maggie said that was the best part of the whole morning and she wanted to go again:)




There will be much more "spazz-english" to come, we had a great time taking pictures of poorly written English signs but I couldn't pass up putting this one here where it belongs...#2

A funny thing that happened as we were waiting for our turn to get on the slide. One of the workers kept staring at Carl and then put his arm around him and started rubbing Carl's earlobe between his thumb and finger. Ok...now that I wrote it, it's sounds creepy in a pedophile way...people were loving our lighter hair and he has golden fuzz on his ears so it cracked me up. Apparently touching golden hair is good luck to them. Maglet wore her hat A LOT! :)

Xi'an--Starfish Foster Home, Terra Cotta Warriors, Muslim Street

Double click each collage to better read if you are so inclined. I apologize for all the collages but really, how can I post 500 pictures or worse yet, choose only one or two from each area. Please forgive my indulgence.

Thank you again and again to my cousin Kevin, his wife Jen and their family who live in Shanghai and were our wonderful hosts. We love you and are thankful to you for teaching us to love all things Chinese!! xo