We also had orientation this morning & it went well! There are a bunch of families in our group, three of which are with us the whole time. What a group of people we are, too. There are a few families with BROODS of children. One of the families is adopting their 10th child! They will have 4 ten year olds at home!!! Another family is adopting their 8th. There were also first time parents-to-be, parents adopting their second Chinese child & a whole mish-mash of others.
After orientation we had this MASSIVE Chinese lunch. They kept bringing in more & more dishes about every 5 minutes & we didn't finish half of it!
Then we went on out tour. Let me start by saying that everything I said last night about driving was negated today. Our bus driver almost ran 3 cars off the road, the intersections are huge and don't go straight & people walk out wherever they think they'll get a break in traffic.
Unfortunately, Tianenman Square was closed because some big meeting was about to happen. We got to walk on the other side of the road & take pictures. It was huge!
We walked past Tianenman Square, right into the Forbidden City. Our tour guide warned us that it would take you 27 days to see everything in the Forbidden City. I thought she was exaggerating, but I was wrong. That place was massive! It took us over half an hour just to walk through all the outer gates to get into the city. I'll post all the pics in Facebook when my VPN starts working again. (I turned the wireless on and am blogging from my phone. Good thing I downloaded the app!) All together, walking past Tianenman square and through the Forbidden City took us 3 hours.
Our last stop was a silk "museum". Sure, we learned how silk is made & saw cool stuff. BUT then we were followed around for an hour by sales people trying to sell us stuff! There were 31 in our party & I would say there were at least half that many sales people! It was so annoying! Needless to say we didn't buy anything there!
Oh well, tomorrow we fly to Guangzhou, which is where we will get our child on Monday! As we were coming in from our tour we saw one woman from our group who didn't come with us on the tour because she was getting her daughter - a 21 month old absolute beauty!!! I can't wait for Monday!!!
Glad to hear all is well and that you were running others off the road rather than the opposite. I hope you're adjusting to the REAL Chinese food as opposed to that General Tso's nonsense we get. Can't wait for the next update, fly safe!
ReplyDeleteI've been those places too, and how exciting for your one tour member to already have her daughter. I really wanted to adopt a Chinese girl, but then I got married and things changed.
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