A Great Day at the Great Wall of China!

The Olympic Stadium; the site of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics! The locals call it the "Birds Nest," as its shape and overlapping structure looks like a bird's nest.


Trish sitting on the Great Wall of China. The building of this wall was an amazing feat! The Great Wall is over 3,800 miles in length, slightly larger than the length of the United States from West to East. Climbing the steps of the Great Wall is definitely not an easy task, but well worth the effort!

Inside the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City covers 70 hectares, approximately 700,000 square meters. WOW! It was truly massive and amazing. It took 14 years to complete and was built from the years 1406 to 1420. It made for a very interesting history lesson!

Shon standing in front of Tian An Em Square. It was closed to the public yesterday, so this was as close as we were able to get to it. Everything in China is BIG. Tian An Em Square is 400,000 square meters in size and is large enough to hold 1 million people.

Today was an amazing day of touring the great sites of Beijing and learning about China's ancient history. We began our day at 9:00AM and returned to our hotel around 6:00PM. It made for a very long and tiring day--but definitely one trip worth making! How exciting to be able to visit firsthand the country of our daughter's birth and to be able to share this with her when she is older! As you can see from the pictures and captions above, we visited Tian An Em Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and then lastly drove by the Olympic Stadium. Our guide, Grace, did an amazing job of sharing with us as much historical information as she could at each site.

Prior to the Great Wall portion of our tour, we stopped off at a Chinese restaurant and had lunch with our group "family style," meaning there is a piece in the center of the table that turns and allows each person at the table to reach all of the different dishes they brought to us. We were able to sample many different Chinese dishes--it was very good and believe me we needed our energy for climbing the Great Wall. In a separate part of the restaurant, there is a factory where they make "Cloisonne" and we were able to take a tour of the factory and see the workers making the beautiful pottery. Cloisonne is actually a French word and it is an ancient metalworking technique using copper and a multi-step enamel process used to produce vases, jewelry, and other decorative items. It is a very tedious process to say the least and is definitely not for those with a short attention span as it takes much patience to bring these pieces to their final beauty! Of course, after our lunch we were taken to the "Friendship Store" where you can buy all types of beautiful Cloisonne items and we couldn't resist purchasing a couple of items.

Well, we have now reached the end of our time in Beijing and have truly enjoyed visiting the ancient history of this country! Shon and I have mentioned to each other several times that this experience has been very surreal and is still hard for us to grasp the fact that we are truly in China! Never in a million years did we ever think that one year ago we would start on a journey that would take us around the globe to China! The past 4 days have kept our minds and our bodies busy as we anticipate the true purpose of this journey...to bring our daughter "Na" home! Tomorrow will be an early morning for us as we head to the Beijing airport and fly to our daughter's city, Hefei.