We're not in Kansas anymore Toto!

This is a picture from the Acrobat show.


This is Lilly making a pearl necklace from a string of freshwater pearls.


This is silk being spun from the silk worm cocoons.

Ni Hao! Hello from Beijing, China! We wanted to let all of you know that we have arrived in Beijing safely and we were so thankful when our plane touched down at the Beijing airport nearly 13 hours after leaving Chicago! I was ready to bend down and kiss the ground, even though it wasn't American soil! 13 hours in an airplane in coach class is definitely not my idea of fun, but nevertheless we are glad to be at this point of our journey. One interesting item to point out regarding our flight to Beijing was that we ended up having seats next to another adopting couple who I had communicated with previously on an internet adoption group and who live just 3 hours north of us in Kansas City. Truly amazing! We had an awesome time talking and getting to know each other and we definitely had enough time to do that! All in all, we ended up meeting approximately 7 other couples on our flight who were headed to China to adopt their children.

It is now Friday evening over here and we surprisingly slept pretty good last night and are hoping for the same tonight. We had a wonderful day today in Beijing! We are trying to adjust to the Chinese cuisine and had an interesting breakfast of steamed eggs, bok choy, bean curd, and a couple of more common items like bacon and a pastry. We were excited to have KFC for lunch; the chicken nuggets hit the spot!

This afternoon we hired a guide to take us shopping around Beijing. We went to many shops including a silk shop, pearl shop, a China-town type market with anything you could ever want, and a Beijing Olympic Souvenir shop. As you may know, China is known for its silk and for its freshwater and saltwater pearls. It was very interesting to learn how to distinguish real pearls from fake pearls and to see how silk is manufactured from the silk worm cocoons. Of course, we had fun making a few purchases along the way! We spent the evening at a Chinese acrobat show. That was a lot of fun!

Please feel free to read what you would like here and discard what you don't. I will be posting quite a bit here as this will be our journal for Jaida to have when she is older. I will try to point out a couple of interesting facts about China each day. So, for today I thought you would find these facts interesting. China has the same land mass as the United States, but has over 1.5 billion people. That is 5 times the population of the U.S. Beijing has a population of 15 million people. In Beijing where there is such a large populus of people, you will not see any houses. Everyone has to live in an apartment complex as there is not enough land to build individual homes. There are high-rise apartment complexes everywhere you look. Also, on the busy streets you will see many types of vehicles, including cars, buses, bikes, motor scooters, and of course walking and the streets are packed bumper to bumper most of the time. Remember, if you ever come to visit, pedestrians do not have the right of way and yes they will run you over! Well, that is your history lesson for the day. Hope you enjoy! I will post a few pictures of our day here and will have more for you tomorrow as we go on a day long tour to the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Tian An Em Square. Zai jian (goodbye) for now!