Beijing - More details

We met our guide Lisa at the airport and the other families who are adopting from our agency. Then headed to the King Wing Hotel. The hotel was awesome. Huge rooms and great food. We saw Tienemen Square and The Forbidden City. Beijing is a great city. It was really clean and not as crowded as we thought it would be. Blue skies! The next day we saw the Summer Palace and climbed the Great Wall. It was a steep climb and the wall is 6000 miles long so it is hard to feel any sense of accomplishment. Funny. It was very crowded with people of all ages climbing very steep stairs. We ate at some great Chinese restaurants. The menus were very interesting with everything from intestines to chicken grissle to things that looked like slugs. We managed to order some things we could recognize. Our guide Lisa was so great. We asked her a million questions about Chinese culture and adoption. We visited an orphanage run by our adoption agency. It is an orphanage for kids who cannot be adopted. They do not have parents but have other living relatives. They were brought to the orphanage becuase they were living in extreme poverty or their exteneded families were just not able to take care of them. It was such a neat visit. The tears were flowing! The kids danced and sang and read from Psalms. Rob lead everyone in Amazing Grace. It was so amazing to get to experience all of this in a Communist country. We were anxious the whole time to get to Grace but it was hard leaving Beijing. It was so comfortable there. The other families would all go to different provinces to meet their children and then after days we would all meet again Guangzhou in Southern China.