Hello from Beijing!

Hello from Beijing, China.

It is so thrilling to be in the beautiful busy city! We arrived safely after a fairly uneventful day of flying yesterday. The kids were great on the flight and we all enjoyed those personal entertainment centers! We did get to watch a few movies and the recorded TV with plenty of use of that rewind feature :) Go Qantas! - it was definitely a good experience all around.

We met up with my Mom once we arrived at our hotel. She is a trooper as she missed an entire night of sleep and has kept up with us and the kids all of this very busy day. Our hotel is nice, the beds are hard but the down comforters are very soft. We all slept well.

Today was action packed and very exciting! We started out with a wonderful breakfast of American bacon, eggs, sausage, croissants, fried noodles and dumplings. Everything was really good - it was a great way to start the day. Our first big sight was the Temple of Heaven. What a interesting piece of Beijing life this large park/temple is - a highlight was all the people exercising on this beautiful day. The grounds were amazing and the buildings beautiful. We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant (I guess they are all Chinese restaurants here heehee!) the food was good.

Next we headed over to the Forbidden City. This place is massive! We enjoyed walking through the grounds of the former Imperial residence. We were losing the kids interest a little so the feathered hacky sack toy Jonah bough from a vendor came in handy.

The Tea House was next up, it was fun if not just a little bit staged for the big sell. oh well, the tea was excellent. Our last event of the day was the Chinese Acrobat Show. We loved the show. It was totally incredible and amazingly the kids enjoyed every minute even at the end of a pretty action packed day. We awarded them for being such troopers with McDonald's for dinner. (I can hear you saying YUCK! and I agree but hey, if the kids aren't happy is anyone actually happy?) Matt took the kids to the huge hotel pool now. We are hoping that wears them out so they fall asleep quickly and get rested up. Tomorrow we head to the Great Wall - I am so excited to see this, I can't even believe we are here!

I'm not even going to try to load photos to this public internet - sorry :) If you want to see where we've been go to my friend Rebel's blog - she went to the same places last and did a great job posting photos. http://www.judgeseven.blogspot.com/

3 more days until we meet Tia!