First Day in Beijing, China

I'm actually a little behind on updates. It's already Sunday evening here. It was late last night when I posted the flight info. Yesterday we did the tourist thing. Our first stop was Tienanmen Square. There were some really nice monuments there. Chairman Mao Tse-tung is entombed in a very large building that unfortunately we could not go into because of renovation. The whole city seems to be undergoing renovation, getting ready for next years Olympics. They have some huge projects. We saw a lot of landscaping going on. A friend of ours came back last year with their baby. She said that they were trying to hide the poor areas. That's going to take a lot of landscaping.

Anyway, here are a couple pics from Tienanmen Square. On the left is one of the many monuments. On the right is Tienanmen Gate. The gate is actually on the north side of the square and across the road.












Once through Tienanmen Gate it is very short walk through the main gate of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is the largest palace complex in the world. Construction began around 1407. The architecture and craftsmanship are extraordinary.
































After this we had lunch in a "Chinese" Restaurant. The food was ok. Their specialty was roast duck. Charlene really liked it. Once we were finished, we went to Children's Hope International (our adoption agency) offices for an orientation.

Our next stop was the Great Wall. It's very impressive up close.













I apologize if the formatting doesn't look right. I'm having a very difficult time updating this blog. At first, I thought the computer somehow deleted the font used on the page. All I could see are little squares where there should be letters. That's the reason I was day behind in updating. Yesterday, I found I could navigate my way to through the log in and updating page just from clicking on what/where I remember things being. A search on Google had the answer to my problem. It's because of China censoring certain websites. I will continue to wrestle with this. Especially after the main event tomorrow!! We are supposed to receive the children tomorrow morning. We can't wait. Charlene finished packing the diaper bag earlier this evening and is now sound asleep and sawing some pretty big logs : )

Catch you tomorrow.